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V. Despair as defined by consciousness

When Kierkegaard told us that we can understand the forms of despair by abstract consideration of the elements of the human synthesis, he only told us half the story. Or, more truthfully, I only told you half of the story, because the quote which began section II goes on:

[...] The self is freedom. But freedom is the dialectical aspect of the categories of possibility and necessity.

However, despair must be considered primarily within the category of cons-ciousness; whether despair is conscious or not constitutes the qualitative distinction between despair and despair. Granted, all despair regarded in terms of the concept is conscious, but this does not mean that the person who, according to the concept, may appropriately be said to be in despair is conscious of it himself. Thus, consciousness is decisive. (p. 29, bold my own)

All of our categories—finite, infinite, possible, necessary—are useful in understanding what may be termed the “abstract” causes of despair. They function as diagnostic categories, helping us to see what it is we need to be reminded of, what it is we need to change in our lives. But they do not qualitatively change the despair; only consciousness of despair can qualitatively change despair.

This is where we begin to unpack the great mystery of despair. Because despair is a qualification relating to spirit, our capacity for despair is not a defect but a surpassing excellence:

If only the abstract idea of despair is considered, without any thought of someone in despair, it must be regarded as a surpassing excellence. The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal, and this superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness or sublimity, that he is spirit.[8]

[8] ...and something even more magnificent, that incomprehensible compounding, that eternal structuring of man, that he is compounded of the temporal and the eternal, that he, as man in kinship with the animal, is again as man in kinship with the divine. (p. 14-15, fn8, bold my own)

Despair is related to the divine, to the eternal, to our spirit. It is precisely because we are “in kinship with the divine” that we are capable of despair, and this is why the possibility of despair is our surpassing excellence. Yet this capacity for despair does not further increase our excellence when it is actualizes, but demeans us. This leads us to a counter-intuitive claim: to free ourselves from despair we must pass through despair:

Compared with the person who is conscious of his despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a negativity further away from the truth and deliverance. Despair itself is a negativity; ignorance of it, a new negativity. However, to reach the truth, one must go through every negativity [...] ignorance [of being in despair] is so far from breaking the despair or changing despair to nondespair that it can in fact be the most dangerous form of despair. To his own demoralization, the individual who in ignorance is in despair is in a way secured against becoming aware—that is, he is altogether secure in the power of despair. (p. 44, bold my own)

VI. Despair in Ignorance

As we saw at the very beginning, Kierkegaard believes that every single one of us has despaired at some point in our lives. This can only be the case if there is a form of despair which is wholly unaware itself. “Despair at its minimum is a state that—yes, one could humanly be tempted almost to say that in a kind of innocence it does not even know that it is despair.” (p. 42) Despair can exist within someone who is unaware of despairing.

In one sense, this ignorant form of despair is the most dangerous form of despair because it is furthest from the truth, furthest from understanding that it is despair. In another sense, it is “almost innocence” and is the mildest form of despair, because one who is in despair, who is aware that he is in despair, and yet remains in despair is in a much deeper hole than one who does not know of despair at all. Becoming aware of despair intensifies the despair—and yet we must deepen our despair before we can become free of it.

Why is it, according to SK, that most men never become aware of their own despair? He says the following:

[...] it is very far from being the case that they Socratically regard being in error in this manner as the worst misfortune—the sensate in them usually far outweighs their intellectuality. For example, if a man is presumably happy, imagines himself to be happy, although considered in the light of truth he is unhappy, he is usually far from wanting to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as is said, it murders his happiness. Why? Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit. However vain and conceited men may be, they usually have a very meager conception of themselves nevertheless, that is, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute that a human being can be; but vain and conceited they are—on the basis of comparison. (p. 42-43, bold my own)

Many people are in despair because they remain wholly within the sensate categories. This is often not an active refusal to reckon with the full reality of being-a-human-ness as it is an unawareness of it. It is difficult to refuse to do something you don’t know is an option; at best it is a refusal by default. Such a stance towards life naturally comes with a “very meager conception” of what humanity can be; this is summed up rather perfectly by Berdyaev: “Man as we know him is to but a small extent human; he is even inhuman. It is not man who is human but God. It is God Who requires of man that he should be human; man on his part makes very little demand for it.”1

This state is the furthest from being truly human; it is for this reason that we must deepen our own despair. “But precisely this—not to be conscious of oneself as spirit—is despair, which is spiritlessness, whether the state is a thoroughgoing moribundity, a merely vegetative life, or an intense, energetic life, the secret of which is still despair.” (p. 44-45) Now here Kierkegaard claims that both “paganism” and “the natural man in Christendom” are precisely in this form of despair: it seems that Kierkegaard may well define paganism as that which lacks this understanding of man as spirit. I am not well-versed in the anthropologies of other religious traditions; I would be quite curious to know if any of the other world religions have touched on understanding man in a similar way. Kierkegaard claims that these ideas of Spirit are unique to Christianity, but never cites any sources.

I do not here take Kierkegaard to be disparaging the sensate and sensate-psychical categories as such: rather I think his issue is with human beings remaining wholly within them. This is similar to how he roughly splits all of life into three spheres—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Kierkegaard has no issue with the aesthetic as such, he even praises it in Sickness as follows:

It would also be very stupid to deny that individual pagans as well as pagan nations en masse have accomplished amazing feats that have inspired and also will inspire poets to deny that paganism boasts examples of what esthetically cannot be admired enough. It would also be foolish to deny that in paganism the natural man can and does lead a life very rich in esthetic enjoyment, using in the most tasteful manner every favor granted him, and even letting art and science serve to heighten, enhance, and refine his pleasure. (p. 45)

The aesthetic and the sensate have their place in the human life. The issue only comes when we remain wholly within them. Ecclesiastes, a book which some have considered to be proto-Existentialist literature, seems to say something similar:

VII. Unconscious Despair in Weakness

All of the above only deals with despair which is unconscious of being despair:

As pointed out earlier, the level of consciousness intensifies the despair. To the extent that a person has the truer conception of despair, if he still remains in despair, and to the extent that he is more clearly conscious of being in despair—to that extent the despair is more intensive. [...] I shall now examine the two forms of conscious despair in such a way as to point out also a rise in the consciousness of the nature of despair and in the consciousness that one’s state is despair, or, what amounts to the same thing and is the salient point, a rise in the consciousness of the self. (p. 48-49)

There are two axes along which our awareness may increase: we may gain understanding of what constitutes despair, and we may become more self-aware of our own state—of despair. Kierkegaard says there are two forms of despair which correspond to how deep our awareness of it is:

• In despair not to will to be oneself: despair in weakness;

• In despair to will to be oneself: despair in defiance.

We will treat each of these in turn.

No despair is entirely free of defiance; indeed, the very phrase “not to will to be” implies defiance. On the other hand, even despair’s most extreme defiance is never really free of some weakness. So the distinction is only relative. (p. 49)

We must keep in mind that although we are opposing these two forms of despair, they are not so far apart as this analysis may make them appear.

In weakness, we despair and do not will to be ourselves. Kierkegaard again splits this classification into two forms: one can be in despair in this way over something earthly, something in the world, or one can be in despair over the eternal, that is, over oneself. As we might expect given the preceding section, we begin with a form of despair which is essentially unaware of itself—despairing over something earthly.

Kierkegaard says this form is “pure immediacy or immediacy containing a quantitative reflection.” (p. 50, italic my own) The adjective “quantitative” is key, here: becoming aware of oneself as spirit is not a mere quantitative difference but a qualitative one. One can only despair over something earthly by not having the “infinite conscious-ness” of what despair is, of what the self is. Of this form of despair, he says the following:

The despair is only a suffering, a succumbing to the pressure of external factors; in no way does it come from within as an act. [...] The man of immediacy is only psychically qualified (insofar as there really can be immediacy without any reflect-ion at all); his self, he himself, is an accompanying something within the dimensions of temporality and secularity, in immediate connection with “the other”, and has but an illusory appearance of having anything eternal in it. The self is bound up in immediacy with the other in desiring, craving, enjoying, etc., yet passively; in its craving, this self is a dative, like the “me” of a child. (p. 51)

As we saw above, the most common form of despair is unconscious despair. When someone despairs over something earthly—a job he wanted but did not get, a particular election did not go his way, some tragedy befell him or his family—there is a lack of reflection in this despair. It is despair unaware of being despair. This form of despair is a mere submission to external factors. Although the man in despair feels that he is dead, that he will never be himself again, if his external situation changes, he immediately springs to life again. He is purely bound up in immediacy, in his immediate situation; there is no reflection to be found. This inability for reflection is, says SK, a failure to become a self.

This form of despair is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Or even lower: in despair not to will to be a self. Or lowest of all: in despair to will to be someone else, to wish for a new self. Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it cannot recognize itself and therefore generally ends in fantasy. (p. 52-53)

When a person trapped in immediacy despairs, she does not even have the where-withal to wish she had become that which she could have become, but didn’t. Rather, she wishes to be someone else. This is confirmed by observing everyday life: many people who are down on their luck will say things to the effect of “Why couldn’t I have just been this other person?” People wish to be someone other than themselves all the time—and yet this is the most futile of all fantasy. There are myriad things I could do to change myself, but not a single one of them will make me someone other than myself. This “most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses” (p. 53) reveals that such a person identifies himself through mere externalities; his identity (or so he thinks) is completely determined by his job, the clothes he wears, etc.

When immediacy is assumed to have some reflection, the despair is somewhat modified; a somewhat greater consciousness of the self comes about, and thereby of the nature of despair and of one’s condition as despair. [...] The advance over pure immediacy manifests itself at once in the fact that despair is not always occasioned by a blow, by something happening, but can be brought on by one’s capacity for reflection, so that despair, when it is present, is not merely a suffering, a succumbing to the external circumstance, but is to a certain degree self-activity, an act. (p. 54)

When one gains some degree of reflection, despair goes from a succumbing motion to a partially active motion. It is reflection that separates us and distinguishes us from our surroundings. Indeed this is to some degree what consciousness, especially self-consciousness, is: my ability to not only have desires but to reflect on those desires is how I separate myself from my immediate environment, which induces these desires in me.

This step is necessary to the process of becoming a self, but it deepens the despair. The despair changes and moves from despairing over something earthly, some particular event or shift in one’s surroundings, and becomes despair over some particular feature of my self:

When the self with a certain degree of reflection in itself wills to be responsible for the self, it may come up against some difficulty or other in the structure of the self, in the self’s necessity. For just as no human body is perfect, so no self is perfect. This difficulty, whatever it is, makes him recoil. (p. 54)

While this is still suffering in weakness, for he is not weak enough to will to be himself, this is closer to becoming a self. He now has the capacity to continue to will to be himself even when grave blows fall upon him. Yet because this reflection is only relative reflection, his struggles will not bring him to fully being himself.

He has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from every externality, this naked abstract self, which, compared with immediacy’s fully dressed self, is the first form of the infinite self and the advancing impetus in the whole process by which a self infinitely becomes responsible for its actual self with all its difficulties and advantages. (p. 55)

The reflection is only quantitative, and therefore is some finite amount. Of course, all finite amounts are small in comparison with the infinite. A billion may as well be three for all the difference it makes to infinity. To reach “infinite abstraction” requires not simply more reflection but a qualitative shift in how they approach life. This sort of despair almost always results in the person turning away from the inward path they must follow to become fully themselves. Instead, they turn outward and take up the externalities which they wish to identify with their “self”—their capacities, talents, abilities, etc.—and move away from these tricky internal issues and focus on the external, the “real” world.

This is a refusal which gradually becomes less conscious over time; the less one reflects, the less one can reflect. This sort of despair, says Kierkegaard, is the most common of all: immediacy with a quantitative reflection. This merely quantitative reflection does not allow them to see that we must become ourselves, no matter our circumstances. “They have not learned to fear, have not learned ‘to have to’ without any dependence, none at all, upon whatever else happens.” (p. 57)

As we transition from considering unconscious despair to considering conscious despair, Kierkegaard explains the difference between despairing over something earthly, and despairing over the earthly as a category:

Is there, then, no essential difference between the two expressions used identically up to now: to despair over the earthly (the category of totality) and to despair over something earthly (the particular)? Indeed there is. When the self in imagination despairs with infinite passion over something of this world, its infinite passion changes this particular thing, this something, into the world in toto; that is, the category of totality inheres in and belongs to the despairing person. The earthly and the temporal as such are precisely that which falls apart or disintegrates into particulars, into some particular thing. The loss or deprivation of every earthly thing is actually impossible, for the category of totality is a thought category. Consequently, the self infinitely magnifies the actual loss and then despairs over the earthly in toto. However, as soon as this distinction (between despairing over the earthly and over something earthly) must be maintained essentially, there is also an essential advance in consciousness of the self. This formula, to despair over the earthly, is then a dialectical initial expression for the next form of despair. (p. 60)

This is where we will pick up next time: the conscious form of despair in weakness, which begins dialectically with the phrase to despair over the earthly.

A few days ago, released an excellent article about how we should (and shouldn’t) approach the Church Fathers:

Gospel Simplicity

How Should We Think about the Church Fathers?

When St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press began its Popular Patristics series nearly 50 years ago, the title might have been a touch aspirational. True, the currents in academia had decidedly swung toward patristics with the ressourcement theologian…

Read more

21 days ago · 53 likes · 18 comments · Austin Suggs

If you’re at all interested in honestly engaging the Fathers, you will find his article well worth your time. As all good writing does, it got me thinking—this time about one question in particular.1 Near the end of the piece, Austin writes the following:

I leave you with less of a fifth and final tip and more of a question to ponder: what is the shape of theological history? [...] Some say theology peaked in the first century, the fourth century, the 12th century, etc. That’s a hard question to answer if you’ve read deeply and widely. It’s even more difficult if you haven’t.

When I read this question, it immediately dug at two related-but-distinct claims that you might hear in ecumenical dialogue/debate spaces:

1. Some variation on “surely you don’t think God would allow the church to err for so long?” This will come up any time one person is defending a doctrine which has a long period of (near-)unanimity within the Church. I’ve heard this on everything from the papacy to the use of icons to gay marriage; catholics, protestants, and orthodox are all willing to grab this from their rhetorical toolbox.

2. Some variation on “well the church believed this by [insert time period] so it must be right.” This is related to the first one, but differs in that I most often hear it in relation to a doctrine which was once believed but fell out of favor. I am protestant, so I hear it spoken most often about the 6th century, since that is roughly when the Reformers believed they were “re-forming” the church to; you might also hear it from Catholics who dislike Vatican II, or other such situations.

Both of these claims have some weight—provided you believe that five hundred years, or a millennium, or two, is long enough that God simply wouldn’t allow us to be wrong for “so long.” There can also be an assumption that those who came before us are purer than we are, greater than we—that they are the age of heroes, and ours is the age of the mundane. In other words, both of these claims require that we believe:

We are no longer the early church.

Now to be clear, I do not mean that we must assume “we are not in the 500s.” That much is obviously true. No, I’m speaking of the shape of theological history: both what came before us and what comes after us. The unspoken assumption beneath both of these claims is that we are a substantial portion of the way through the history of the church. To see why, consider a world where we come to find out that the Church will be present for one million years before Christ returns. On this timescale, it doesn’t matter if we invoke the first or the second claim: five hundred years and two thousand years are both minuscule2 in relation to the sum total of church history. Someone in the year 800,000 AD will consider you and I “early church” just as much as they do Augustine and Chrysostom.

Now, no man knows the day nor the hour, so it is pointless to guess a precise length of time before Christ’s second coming. Christ may return five seconds after you read this sentence, or he may return 13.8 billion years from now. That being said, allow me to give some brief food for thought to challenge the assumption that we are no longer in the “early church.”

On our current models of the Big Bang, the universe we inhabit is roughly 13.8 billion years old. For most of that history, Earth did not exist, as Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. For most of Earth’s history, mammals did not exist, as mammals are only 225 million years old. For most of the history of mammals, humans did not exist, as we are only 300 thousand years old. For most of human history, writing did not exist, as writing is less than ten thousand years old. And for most of the history of writing, humans did not understand physics, as our physics is only 300 years old. From our God-given ability to study creation and her history, we can see that God has no issue working on timescales which boggle our minds. This alone should give us pause about assuming five hundred years is a long time for theology.

But we need not only search the natural world—God is more than willing to bend human timescales in the Bible itself. Consider the prologue to Isaac’s birth:

Genesis 18:9–15: They said to him, “Where is Sarah your wife?” And he said, “She is in the tent.” [10] The LORD said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. [11] Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years. The way of women had ceased to be with Sarah. [12] So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” [13] The LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ [14] Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.” [15] But Sarah denied it, saying, “I did not laugh,” for she was afraid. He said, “No, but you did laugh.” (ESV)

We all know how this ends. God miraculously gives a child to Sarah, a 90 year old woman. There are plenty of other examples to be had, but Peter sums it up nicely for us: for the Lord, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.3

I think this should give us pause about assuming we know how long a period of time is, theologically speaking. Again, Christ could return tomorrow, or in trillions of years, or anywhen in between. I am not arguing that we should assume for certain that it will be a long time yet. I aim to point out here, rather, that we should perhaps loosen our grip on such assumptions to begin with. Where this leaves us is less comfortable: we are trapped betwixt the already and the not-yet, and we must do theology as such. Theology is our attempt to understand the divine; we must do theology on God’s time, not ours.

A final word of encouragement—I think all of us are already comfortable with letting go of our chronological assumptions with one major doctrine. Slavery. For most of our history, slavery was oft-promoted and certainly condoned. Yet our forefathers recognized that regardless of the history of the doctrine, slavery was an intrinsically evil practice that should be understood as such. This meant the church was in error for nearly two millennia, yes. But we must not fear this, for God is only in truth, not falsehood. Let us pray not for certainty nor safety, but only that our work would have a “purifying and liberating significance for Christian thought.”

This essay admittedly leaves many questions open. Is it possible at all to do theology without an assumption of where we are in the timeline? If not, how tightly must we hold to whatever assumption we choose? What is the nature of revelation more generally? If you find yourself provoked, as I am, by these questions, please do leave your thoughts in the comments. I would love to hear about where you agree, disagree, or have questions: I am hardly settled on the matters discussed here. Any feedback is welcome and valued.

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Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

—Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

My dearest Wormwood,

I am sure you will agree that punishment for shoddy work is necessary, but hardly pleasant. I enjoyed turning in your reports of ineptitude no more than you, I assure you; but as you know, failure cannot not go unnoticed by Our Father Below. All things considered, your five decades of imprisonment and torture was a rather modest sentence. I have recommended that you be given a probationary case to prove your worth in the fight against the Enemy. If you are granted this opportunity, I am certain you understand that a second failure will not be so lightly addressed.

However, you are in luck! While you were away, the humans, in their never-ending quest for technological mastery, have invented weapons which even our top devils would not have dreamed of. In all my years, I have not before witnessed an age so replete with tools for our use. Soon you will be introduced to the wonders of what they call the Internet, which gives them access to an endless wellspring of whatever they can bring themselves to ponder. You will come to love words like Instagram and YouTube and Twitter; when used properly, they represent our salvation. There is very little the Enemy can do when one of our patients is in the death-grip of a “doomscroll”.

These tools are best used for distraction. You may recall my case of the staunch atheist who loved to read at the British Museum: I saved him from the clutches of the Enemy by distracting him with the thought of lunch. Now the thought of food is but a far cry from what we can marshal with the present weaponry.

As you know, the strategy department periodically releases directives on how we should approach battle with the Church. We see that horrible thing in all its poisonous luminosity; it has taken centuries for our smartest minds to understand how she works. The current directive is simple: scapegoating. We choose a particular group of people—it does not matter in the slightest who we choose, in truth—to make the scapegoat of the so-called Christians, and watch as they tear themselves apart. It well and truly does not matter who we scapegoat: homeless drug addicts, queer people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, no matter. Whoever we choose, those who are not members of the scapegoat will throw themselves into a fervor, believing that they have found the source of all evil in their lives. They, believing that they have the power of the Enemy on their side, will resort to all their basest instincts when engaging with those in the scapegoated group. Petty slander, slurs, empty death threats: all we have to do is nudge our patients in the right direction. Few evils are more delicious than those committed under the influence of a misguided taste for “justice”.

If your new case happens to be a member of the church—as understood by the humans, not as we see it—then you need do little more than convince him that any old issue, say gay marriage, represents our Father’s own hand reaching into his country, and watch as the fireworks begin. Few thoughts are more useful to us than “at least I’m not as bad as him!“ It accomplishes two goals in one stroke: we distract the patient from focusing on the Enemy, and we give our patient an outlet for all his evil desires which the Enemy works so hard to transform. All the better that we use the Enemy’s own words against Him; we can tell our patients that what they are doing is “important” and “theologically necessary”. Direct your patient’s focus away from the things of the Enemy: serving the poor, listening to the bereft, caring for the outcast. Let your patient take some particular issue, especially one which the Enemy wants to be peripheral at best, and make it so large that your patient blocks out his view of the Enemy with our petty squabble.

If your patient happens to be a member of a group which the church deems irredeemable, all the better! It will be the easiest thing in the world for you to convince your patient that the Enemy is not real—or, if He is real, that He despises your patient. After all, your patient will have experienced (or think they have experienced) the “love” of the Enemy firsthand; nothing is quite so painful for a member of the oppressed than the “love” of the oppressors. You might think it dangerous to create oppressors and oppressed, given one of their sages once cried to the Enemy over the tears of the oppressed, but a propaganda piece from many years ago has convinced them that “Ecclesiastes” is far too depressing to actually read. The Enemy does love your patient—a statement which we still have not managed to understand, what He sees in humans I do not know—but you cannot let them discover this. All you need to do is keep them focused on the dastardly mess which we have created under the name of “the church” and your patient will hardly suspect that there is a difference between “the church” and The Church.

This is what makes scapegoating so masterful when it is successful. We hardly have to do anything at all; the humans will practically do our work for us! A whisper here, a suggestion there, the thought of “At least I’m better than…” and they do the rest. The oppressors will rip themselves to shreds trying to outdo one another in vice like anger and malice; the oppressed, believing that this is the work of the Enemy, will turn away from Him. One of our good friends, Glubose, has convinced the leader of a powerful denomination that he should campaign for the reversal of gay marriage—to save the children! Glubose whispers in his ear, “think of the children,” all the while distracting him from the rampant abuse scandals which plague his own denomination.1 I must congratulate Glubose when I next see him, it is truly a masterful stroke. As long as Glubose keeps him away from those dastardly words of the Enemy during his stint as a human—something about a log in one’s own eye, I don’t recall—he shall go down in history as chief among Our Father’s soldiers.

You know, there was a time when our scapegoating tactic simply did not work very well. Back in the early days, when the Enemy had just finished his stint as a human and even we did not know if he was coming back in five minutes, those who identified as Christians were themselves the oppressed. How they remained in the clutches of the Enemy despite our best attempts remains something of a mystery to us: we threw prison, torture, martyrdom at them, all to no avail. One of my Roman patients once attempted to insult the Christians by saying that “Christianity is a religion of women and poor people.”2 And yet that is precisely what the Enemy wants! He is far more at home spending time with the oppressed, those people on the margins who we have such little interest in, than he is with those in power. Truly I do not understand what He sees in them. But during that time, His followers were great and terrible in might; they refused to see anyone as worse than themselves, and spent every last drop of effort attempting to help the poor and the sick. It was dark days, then: Our Father Below had just suffered his most terrible wound, as you know, and we did not know what would happen.

I am sure you will forgive your old uncle for reminiscing about bygone days; it is a habit I try not to engage in too frequently. I hope these notes will be of use to you as you attempt to prove yourself once more.

Affectionately yours,

Uncle Screwtape

There is an understanding of Christianity, rampant in today’s church, which renders “Do you believe in gay marriage?” the most pressing possible question you can ask your fellow man. Not “Do you believe that Christ is Lord?” or “Have you been baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?” but “Do you believe in gay marriage?” No longer does trinitarianism nor Christ himself draw the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but gay marriage. Is this not rather strange—that a question which could only have possibly been asked by those living after 18503 is now the dividing line between the saved and the damned?

And it is not merely in matters of theology where this question has taken over, but in ethics as well. Many christians seem to be more emotionally invested in making sure gay people do not have sex than they are in any other ethical questions of our day. And I want to know—why? Why is this the question of ethics that the church has decided makes or breaks orthodoxy, makes or breaks whether someone is a “good person”? Are we justified in making not only sexual ethics, but a rather narrow subset of sexual ethics, the primary issue upon which all Christians must take a stand or be condemned as apostate? Or is this preoccupation more likely to be the work of the Enemy than a work of God?

It is clear from any reading of the Bible that the question of gay sex4 is at best a peripheral one. In the New Testament, it is directly addressed at most three times, none of which occur in the Gospels. There is so much more to the ethical life of the earliest Christians than policing one’s sexual proclivities. We can see this through the Sermon on the Mount, which shows us what our lives should consist of. It looks like mourning with those who mourn; being merciful peacemakers; letting go of anger; loving those who hate you; giving to the poor; avoiding judgment of others; in sum, treating all as you would be treated. And, yes, he commands us to not commit adultery. That is important—questions of sexual ethics are certainly not unimportant—but it is no less important than anything else on this list. Indeed, many of them are more important, based on how many parables and miracles of Christ are focused on feeding the poor, healing the sick, and sitting with the outcast. If this be the case, why do so many take up a small handful of words, words which do not address LGBTQ people directly, and use them as swords to cut into our flesh? Why have we become the chosen scapegoats of our time? Are we not also made in Christ’s image?

I am not saying, dear reader, that questions of sexual ethics hold no weight. On the contrary, I think the questions of what we do with our bodies, sexual or otherwise, are often neglected. But they are neglected because of this: in so much of our Online Discourse, “Christian ethics” now means “Christian sexual ethics,” and “Christian sexual ethics” means “why gay people can’t have sex.” If you want to talk about sexual ethics, fine! But you better be talking about the ethics of the things you are doing in your own bedroom before you talk about other people’s bedrooms.5 And while you’re at it, I suggest thinking about what value your body has outside of the bedroom—your body is far more than a receptacle for a soul and a sexual pleasure device.

Now, lest I give the impression that I am somehow the perfect Christian handing down these thoughts from on high, I should express my own responsibility here.6 There is an equally terrible danger that I can and do fall into: repeating and recreating the same oppressive structures which hurt queer people. It is far too easy, far too tempting, to become evil for the sake of victory over evil. Kierkegaard challenges each of us to read the Bible as though it is speaking solely to ourselves. Presenting Christ’s call in a way that challenges only others and not myself would be the gravest of misunderstandings. I am guilty of the thought “at least I’m better than…,” which makes me complicit in all of this. Let him who is without sin cast the first brick.

Crying out for salvation from injustice is demanded by the Imago Dei, but it does not give anyone the right to denigrate the Imago Dei in others—including those who hurt us or disagree with us. The real issue here is not gay against straight, black against white, Gentile against Jew, but the very notion of us versus them. The same standard which we would uphold others to we must first uphold ourselves, otherwise all is lost. Did not Christ teach us to treat others as we would wish to be treated? We are commanded to love our enemies whether our love is reciprocated or not. This goes for all of us; what must end is not “homophobia” per se but the cycle of oppression and the scapegoating of others.

Sexual ethics is an important piece of the picture which Christ demands of us in the Sermon on the Mount—but it is far from the only piece. Nor are many questions of sexual ethics directly resolved by the biblical text: gay marriage, modern divorce law, even masturbation are all understood now in vastly different ways than they were by the cultures which produced the Bible. This creates uncertainty which we must honestly grapple with, as Jacob grappled with God; we should give one another grace and understanding when there are disagreements, not ire and hatred.

I have been subjected to this misplaced energy directed towards casting all gay people as sexual deviants who desire the end of “Western Society” or other nebulous bullshit catchphrases.7 But on the whole, I have had it rather mildly compared to many of my friends. I have watched, and am watching, people in my life get kicked out of their own families after coming out. Many of my friends worry about disownment and hide their experiences because christian culture has decided that christian ethics means “gay people bad.” I helplessly stood as a spectator while friends underwent long periods of anxiety, depression, even suicidal ideation: all because they have internalized the notion that being queer makes you Lucifer’s own right-hand man. It would be bad enough to see and experience this, whatever the cause—but this is happening because God’s own people are using God’s own word to maim and martyr our fellow image-bearers.

The question I keep asking at the end of the day is the following: is christian ethics truly best summed up in telling a specific, marginalized group of people what they aren’t allowed to do? Or is that a radical misunderstanding of the expectation Christ placed on his followers?

If you made it this far, please consider becoming a paid supporter of my work. While none of my articles will ever be paywalled, your support will help me continue justifying my writing as a regular part of my life as I begin a PhD program in August. I am also working on some additional benefits for paid subscribers, including potential zoom meetings and other assorted things like handwritten notes. Regardless of whether you choose to support my work monetarily or not, thank you for reading!

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Prolegomena

Kierkegaard’s depression insisted upon itself so strongly that he believed every human to ever live encountered depression on a near-daily basis. Or at least, that’s what stereotypes of our boy Søren would have you believe. If you read The Sickness Unto Death,1 you will come across passages which make no attempt to dispel this notion:

Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain. In any case, no human being ever lived and no one lives outside of Christendom who has not despaired, and no one in Christendom if he is not a true Christian, and insofar as he is not wholly that, he still is to some extent in despair. (p. 22, bold my own)

I suppose this stereotype is rather more understandable than some others. Passages like the above are what led Corey Mohler of Existential Comics fame to create comics like this:

All of this is well and good but it misses the most important question: what does Kierkegaard mean by despair? Is it analogous to our english word depression? Do they have roughly similar meanings, or is Kierkegaard using it in a rather more technical, nuanced, and bespoke sense?

I. What is Despair?

To understand what Kierkegaard means by the term despair, we must briefly consider what Kierkegaard understands human persons to be made of. This means we must contend with one of the worst sentences I have read in the English language:

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. (p. 13, bold my own)

The fifth sentence is so bad that there is genuine debate in the literature over whether Kierkegaard was satirizing Hegel with the structure of this sentence. We, however, are blessed; the part we care about is the sentence after it, which I have bolded. To be a human is to be a synthesis of three opposing pairs: finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, necessity and freedom. As we will see, the finite, the temporal, and the necessary are all related to one another and share many qualities. Similarly, the infinite, the eternal, and the possible/free are tied to one another within the human person.

This leads to Kierkegaard’s first definition (of sorts) of despair:

If a human self had itself established itself, then there could be only one form [of despair]: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself. (p. 14, bold my own)

No human being established itself, but was established by another. This means that when we “relate ourselves to ourselves” we must also relate to the power which established ourselves. Despair is both a misrelation to ourselves and a misrelation to that power—we fail to properly relate ourselves to our true nature, and we fail to properly relate ourselves to this higher power, which for Kierkegaard is God.

Despair is a misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself. [11]

[11] ...misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself, between the temporal and the eternal in the human being compounded of the temporal and the eternal. (p. 15, fn11)

Thus despair for Kierkegaard is not really something like “depression” in our modern parlance. Rather, despair is a failure to engage with the full reality of being a human person; it is a lived misunderstanding of what we are. This is also what gives Kierkegaard the ability to say that every person is in despair:

The common view has a very poor understanding of despair. Among other things, it completely overlooks (to name only this, which, properly understood, places thousands and thousands and millions in the category of despair), it completely overlooks that not being in despair, not being conscious of being in despair, is precisely a form of despair. [...] Despair is a qualification of the spirit, is related to the eternal, and thus has something of the eternal in its dialectic. [...] But to be unaware of being defined as spirit is precisely what despair is. (p. 23-25)

In other words, all people have been in despair because despair fundamentally consists in this lived-out misunderstanding of human nature—and no human has perfectly lived out what it means to be human. If we are, as Kierkegaard says, defined by spirit and have something of the eternal within ourselves; if I have this eternal nature, but do not recognize my own eternality, then though I think myself not in despair I am in despair because I misunderstand what I am, and therefore fail to properly live my own life.

We can consider despair as defined by the constituents of the synthesis, and we can consider despair as defined by our own awareness of being in despair.

II. Despair as defined by the synthesis

Kierkegaard says that we may understand the causes of despair by reflecting on the pieces which make up the human synthesis:

The forms of despair may be arrived at abstractly by reflecting upon the constituents of which the self as a synthesis is composed. The self is composed of infinitude and finitude. However, this synthesis is a relation, and a relation that, even though it is derived, relates itself to itself, which is freedom. The self is freedom, But freedom is the dialectical aspect of the categories of possibility and necessity. (p. 29)

That is, by considering these aspects of infinitude and finitude, of possibility and necessity, we can understand how a misrelation—which is despair—can appear in our own lives. This misrelation is not simply problematic in an abstract technical sense: Kierkegaard says that despair obstructs us from becoming ourselves:

The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the progress of the becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. But if the self does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows that or not. (p. 29-30)

Here we get a second definition of despair. Despair is to fail to become oneself. This is the selfsame existential concern we saw in the first part of this series. What Kierkegaard is ultimately concerned with is shaking us out of our slumber and forcing us to become ourselves. We are really quite far from being our true selves; the existentialist project, whether theistic or otherwise, is an attempt to help us close that gap.

Kierkegaard uses this lens to split despair into four different forms, one for each component of the synthesis we have mentioned. Because “no form of despair can be defined directly” (p. 30) he defines infinitude’s despair as lacking finitude, finitude’s despair as lacking infinitude, etc. We will briefly explore each of these in due course.

III. Despair of the infinite and the finite

To have the despair of the infinite is to lack finitude:

Infinitude’s despair, therefore, is the fantastic, the unlimited, [...] The fantastic, of course, is most closely related to the imagination [Phantasie], but the imagination in turn is related to feeling, knowing, and willing. As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing; it is not a capacity, as are the others—if one wishes to speak in those terms, it is the capacity instar omnium [for all capacities]. (p. 30-31)

Feeling, knowing, willing; all of these can embrace the fantastic and lose the necessary component of finitude. This occurs, says Kierkegaard, through the “capacity” of the imagination; we lose things to infinitude by allowing our imagination to roam too freely.

When feeling becomes fantastic by losing finitude, it becomes a sort of “abstract sentimentality” that fails to do anything concretely in the world because of its lack of finitude. I could attempt to illustrate this myself, but Dostoevsky has already painted a better picture than I ever could:

“It’s just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder. “He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’ (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Chapter 4. Copied from this link.)

The man getting on in years has lost his finitude in his feeling. He is only able to love man in abstracto, is entirely unable to love any particular, concrete, finite man who is before him. This is precisely feeling being lost to the despair of finitude—he has only a feeling for some potentially infinite category like “mankind”, but has no ability to feel for finite instantiations thereof. Such a man loses not only his capacity to love particular men, but loses himself. He cannot be identified with some universal situation, for he is a particular man with a particular life and place and situation in the world—the same sort of man which he finds himself incapable of loving!

Knowing and willing similarly become fantastic when they lose their grips on the finite. Willing becoming fantastic in this way is something I experience quite often. There are many projects that I would like to pursue—piano sonatas, book writing, math videos, my ever-increasing reading list. Yet my ability to take the smallest of baby steps towards any of these projects decreases precisely as my plans expand in scope. It is far easier—at least for me—to imagine myself learning five different piano sonatas, or reading a dozen massive novels this summer, or working out every day, than it is for me to begin the concrete process of working on any of these projects. This is the despair of the infinite: this lacks finitude. The despair of the infinite has the character of volatility: one’s self becomes a sort of vapor, a mist, which flutters through your hands despite all attempts to grasp it. To lack the finite ultimately means to be unable to find yourself; all attempts to return to yourself come up empty-handed.

Finitude’s despair, on the other hand—to lack infinitude—is connected with the notion of narrowness and limitation. Kierkegaard says that ultimately this results in becoming completely finitized, “becoming a number instead of a self, just one more man, just one more repetition of this everlasting Einerlei [one and the same].” (p. 33) The despair of finitude causes people to reduce themselves to identification with groups of people: their selfhood becomes wholly defined by membership in a political party, a denomination, or a profession.

Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self certainly is angular, but that only means that it is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth, not that it is utterly to abandon being itself out of fear of men, [...] But whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by “the others.” Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man. (p. 33-34)

This sort of despair is hardly recognized as despair at all, for those who despair in this way “mortgage themselves to the world” and thereby may gain all the world has to offer—at the mere cost of themselves! The despair of finitude is the despair of the rat race, of becoming a corporate shill speaking LinkedIn-ese for the sake of that sweet sweet raise next quarter. It is the despair of finitude that populism and fascism are so prone to cause in their people. The German volksgeist and the ultranationalism of Japan during WWII, both of which preached the idea that the best (and only) good thing you can do is “serve your people”, are especially prescient examples.

IV. Despair of the possible and the necessary

Just as we saw that infinitude’s despair is to lack finitude, and vice versa, so also we have that possibility’s despair is to lack necessity, and vice versa. Kierkegaard describes how both of these components are present within the human self as follows:

Just as finitude is the limiting aspect in relation to infinitude, so also necessity is the constraint in relation to possibility. Inasmuch as the self as a synthesis of finitude and infinitude is established, is κατὰ δύναμιν [potential], in order to become itself it reflects itself in the medium of imagination, and thereby the infinite possibility becomes manifest. The self is κατὰ δύναμιν [potentially] just as possible as it is necessary, for it is indeed itself, but it has the task of becoming itself. Insofar as it is itself, it is the necessary, and insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility. (p. 35)

To be in the despair of possibility, which is to lack necessity, is therefore to stop being oneself, to cease to have oneself. Imagining the possibilities one could live through or experience overtakes the experience of reality itself; lacking necessity disconnects us from actuality, from the concrete situation we are in. Having too much possibility is problematic because actualizing possibility (thereby turning it into necessity) takes time.

This illustrates quite well how the possible is tied to the infinite—my inability to actualize any particular project of mine contains elements of the despair of infinitude and of possibility alongside one another. I would much rather imagine myself doing myriad different projects instead of engaging concretely with a particular project; this is both the despair of infinity and the despair of possibility.

Kierkegaard says that this form of despair primarily manifests itself in two ways: desiring/craving, and melancholy/anxiety. One despairs in this way either by chasing desire for so long that you eventually cannot make your way back to yourself, trapped in daydream or pleasure-seeking; or by chasing an anxious thought for so long that eventually your world becomes infused with this melancholic anxiety, unable to free oneself from some terrible event which is not real but possibly could be.

Under this lens, our final form of despair is necessity’s despair, which is to lack possibility. Possibility is like oxygen—too much of it is poisonous, not enough and you will die. This is the first point in the book at which Kierkegaard becomes explicitly religious for an extended period, for it is here that God is most relevant to understanding despair. Consider a believer who knows that some event will, humanly speaking, be his certain downfall. Now say that that event happens:

The believer has the ever infallible antidote for despair—possibility—because for God everything is possible at every moment. This is the good health of faith that resolves contradictions. The contradiction here is that, humanly speaking, downfall is certain, but that there is possibility nonetheless. [...]

To lack possibility means either that everything has become necessary for a person or that everything has become trivial. (p. 39-40)

When everything becomes necessary for a person, she loses the ability to take hold of her life. The fatalist has no God, because God’s existence means that everything is possible—but for the fatalist everything is necessary. Kierkegaard says that at most, a fatalist’s worship is an interjection, a mute interjection. The life of one for whom everything has become trivial is no better. Life is reduced to probabilities; “it is likely that” or “this is how things usually go” render life little more than a slideshow put on for our entertainment. The ability to get invested into life is lost for such a person; they have no hope nor fear, merely dice.

The fatalist has enough imagination, enough possibility to despair of possibilities. The trivialist has no such recourse, for this mentality “reassures itself with the trite and obvious and is just as much in despair whether things go well or badly.” The former truly lacks possibility and is thus unable to temper necessity, but the latter’s “philistine-bourgeois mentality” believes it has taken control of possibility:

...it leads possibility around imprisoned in the cage of probability, exhibits it, imagines itself to be the master, does not perceive that precisely thereby it has imprisoned itself in the thralldom of spiritlessness and is the most wretched of all. The person who gets lost in possibility soars high with the boldness of despair; he for whom everything became necessity overstrains himself in life and is crushed in despair; but the philistine-bourgeois mentality spiritlessly triumphs. (p. 42)

These four terms, finite, infinite, possible, necessary, give us one way of considering what despair is. There is a second lens which gives us additional insight into this misrelation which Kierkegaard calls “despair”—that of our awareness of being in despair. But as this article is already too long, we shall have to save it for next week, which will continue exploring Kierkegaard’s concept of despair.

If you made it this far, please consider becoming a paid supporter of my work. While none of my articles will ever be paywalled, your support will help me continue justifying my writing as a regular part of my life as I begin a PhD program in August. I am also working on some additional, non-written-content benefits for paid subscribers, including potential zoom meetings and other assorted things like handwritten notes. Regardless of whether you choose to support my work monetarily or not, thank you for reading!

Romans 16:16: Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you.

1 Corinthians 16:20: All the brothers and sisters send greetings. Greet one another with a holy kiss.

2 Corinthians 13:11-12: Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Be restored; listen to my appeal; agree with one another; live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. 12 Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.

1 Thessalonians 5:26: Greet all the brothers and sisters with a holy kiss.

1 Peter 5:14: Greet one another with a kiss of love. Peace to all of you who are in Christ.1

Isn’t it a bit odd that a command which is repeated in the New Testament in five different letters is wholly forgotten (or, worse, actively ignored) in the majority of American churches today? If you were at any point a regular churchgoer in America, is there a time you can recall where this command was listened to in any regard? I certainly can’t. We are more likely to ask “What on earth was St. Paul thinking?” than to listen on this one. I think this is a bigger issue than most of us realize. And I think one of our Christian Existentialists can, in a roundabout way, help us see what the issue is more clearly.

Last time, we focused on a concept that Tillich calls the existential attitude. As we saw, all four of our thinkers express some form of this idea—there are certain realms of life which require us to engage them with the whole of our person:

The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence. This includes temporal, spatial, historical, psychological, sociological, biological conditions. (The Courage to Be, p. 115, bold my own)

What we will focus on today is one of the factors in the bolded list; one which, strangely in my eyes, only one of our authors devoted any time to. It is that of our biology, our embodiment. Perhaps the other three authors discuss this theme elsewhere. In my readings, only Marcel devoted substantial time and energy to thinking about the importance of our bodies for entering the existential attitude. (If you haven’t already, I recommend at least glancing at part one, so that you can get a sense of the sort of participation Tillich and the others are speaking of.)

It should be noted, before we dive in, that Marcel’s text Creative Fidelity is really a collection of essays whose aim is to sketch a panorama of his philosophy. My focus here will be on the first “chapter” of Creative Fidelity, entitled Incarnate being as the central datum of metaphysical reflection. While this idea does come up with some frequency throughout Creative Fidelity, it is not a main focus again in the book. If you, as I do, want to further explore Marcel’s thoughts on embodiment, we shall have to look elsewhere.

Where Shall We Begin?

The question of where to begin philosophical inquiry, a point which we hope will be a certain and sure point from which to depart, is an important one. The goal of philosophy is to understand our lives, our experiences, and the world: from the myriad possible places, whence shall we start our project? Marcel says that this inquiry “must be based on a certitude which is not rational or logical but existential; if existence is not at the beginning it is nowhere...” (p. 15, bold mine).2 Solipsism, he says, is not self-contradictory, but empty and meaningless. Solipsism is a denial of “existence” to all things except myself—but it is impossible to deny existence to “all things” without failing to properly define “existence.” So, something exists. Is there some privileged existent which we cannot deny without absurdity and contradiction? Yes: it is that I exist. But not merely the “I” as identified with my subjective reality or selfhood:

If the self that I am is construed as a subject, a subjective reality, if the “I” in “I exist” is identified with this subjective reality, then the assertion cannot stand up under scrutiny. What justifies the assertion, the criteria of validity, cannot be determined. The assertion “I exist” is valid only if it signifies, in an admittedly loose and inadequate way, an original datum which is not “I think” nor even “I am alive,” but rather “I experience,” and this expression must be accepted in its maximal range of indefiniteness. (p. 16)

In other words, I can know with certainty that I exist, yet not because I am thinking nor because I am living, but because I am experiencing. Berdyaev would likely assent to this, saying “I suffer, therefore, I exist. This is truer and more profound than the cogito of Descartes.”3 In this Cartesian mode, the fact of my experiencing gives me certainty that “I” exist. But this is not anywhere close to capturing the full extent of “existence”:

Of course, by a conscious act of abstraction I can apprehend myself as a being of pure feeling. On this basis I can, in the cartesian mode, infer that I am. But when I assert: I exist, I certainly mean something more than this; I vaguely imply that I am not only for myself but that I manifest myself, or rather am manifested; the prefix ex in exist, has primary significance because it conveys the meaning of a movement towards the external world, a centrifugal tendency. I exist: that means I have something by which I can be known or identified, either by another person or by myself insofar as I assume for myself a borrowed otherness; none of these characteristics are separable from the fact that “there is my body.” (p. 17, bold my own)

For Marcel, our embodied existence is the central fact of our existence, and indeed is constitutive of our existence. To exist is not only to exist for myself: the prefix ex- denotes that I exist in an outward facing manner. This can be said of me when we consider my body. The importance of the body, then, cannot be overstated—it is the center node from which everything else in one’s life shines outward. My body “is the datum relative to which there are other existents, and, it may be added, the basis of the division between existence and non-existence.” (p. 17) The example he gives of how my body determines existence and non-existence is that of Caesar: to say that “Caesar existed” is not simply to say that Caesar would have been perceived by me, were I present. This claim goes further; it is a claim that there is “an objectively determinable temporal continuity” (p. 18) between Caesar’s existence and my own.4

“I” and “My Body”

Having established experience—that is to say, my body—as the foundational point from which to begin philosophy,5 Marcel now turns to a rather thorny question. What are we to do with the phrase “my body”? What is the relationship between “I” and “my body”? Every way we turn to resolve this only runs us into trouble. We might be first tempted to say that my body is my instrument. Instruments are means of extending or strengthening the natural capabilities of people: eyeglasses extend our vision, knives sharpen our ability to slice, a ladder my ability to reach things. Each of these tools take a capacity I already have and furthers it in some way. Can the same be said of my body?

On first glance, it appears possible to say yes, my body is my instrument. This is especially so if you are used to thinking of the human body from an external, scientific perspective—doctors, in virtue of their profession, must daily consider the natural capacities and powers of the human body. But this view is a view from outside—and I am not outside my own body. If we suppose my body is an instrument, the killing question to this view is “an instrument of what?” Any answer is in danger of an infinite regress: if my body is an instrument of my soul, then the body extends the capacities my soul naturally has. But then that soul may be said, by the same logic, to be an instrument of something else, and we fall into the abyss. So my body is not my instrument. This argument, says Marcel, holds true for any objective relationship whatsoever that we might imagine betwixt “my body” and “I”. There is no room for a gap between myself and my body.

Does this then mean that I am reducible to my body, that materialism is true? Marcel thinks not.

The alleged identity is absurd; it is possible to affirm it only if the I is first implicitly denied, thereby becoming the materialist assertion: my body is myself, only my body exists. But this assertion is absurd. For it is a property of my body that it does not and cannot exist alone. [...] Furthermore, in a purely objective world, what becomes of the principle of intimacy (my body) around which the existential orbit is created? (p. 19)

Now, I admit to being a tad confused on his argument here. It is not so clear to me why he jumps from “my body is myself” to “only my body exists” to “my body does not exist alone, therefore this is false”. Where I do agree with him here, however, is that if we naively reduce “I” to “my body”, we lose the ability to meaningfully talk about persons existing at all. There is clearly something to this principle of intimacy—my body, not anyone else’s—that we lose by making this materialist assumption. This leaves us with quandary: we can neither identify “myself” with “my body”, nor can we speak of “myself” having some concrete relationship and therefore distance between “my body”. This leads to Marcel’s notion of incarnate being:

To be incarnated is to appear to oneself as body, as this particular body, without being identified with it nor distinguished from it—identification and distinction being correlative operations which are significant only in the realm of objects. What clearly emerges from the foregoing reflections is the fact that there is no distinct haven to which I can repair either outside of or within my body. Disincarnation is not practically possible and is precluded by my very structure. (p. 20, bold mine)

We can neither be identified with nor distinguished from our bodies, because our bodies in truth cannot be existentially considered as objects but must be considered as subjects. This raises a strange paradox. I can only have scientific knowledge of my body by considering it as not my body. It is by viewing my body as one object in an infinite world of objects that I can gain scientific knowledge about it. We can only be knowing subjects in this way if we relate to our bodies as if we were not our bodies. Marcel goes even further:

If I abstract from the index characterizing my body—insofar as it is mine—if I construe it as one body among an unlimited number of other such bodies, I will be forced to treat it as an object, [...] It then becomes an object of scientific knowledge; it becomes problematic, so to speak, but only on condition that I consider it as not—mine; and this detachment which is essentially illusory, is the very basis of all cognition. As knowing subject, I re-establish or claim to re-establish that dualism between my body and me, that interval which, we have learned, is inconceivable from an existential point of view. [...] This paradox is fundamental for the object, for I can really think about the object only if I acknowledge that I do not count for it, that it does not take me into account. (p. 20)

In a roundabout way, Marcel seems to be describing the difference between science and phenomenology. Science requires that we consider the world as objects. Science can only be done in an objectivizing mode; if I want to understand my own experience as an individual self, I therefore cannot do science. This is where phenomenology—the study of the structures of consciousness—steps in. Phenomenology comes with the added difficulty of recognizing that, just by observing that you are having experience, you change the character of that experience!

Consider a rather banal example. You are sitting in class, attempting to give your attention to what is a rather boring and ill-structured lecture. Your leg, without conscious intention, is bouncing up and down. Your experience of bouncing your leg up and down while focusing your full attention on the lecturer is very different from your experience once you become aware of your leg! Studying this difference is the realm of phenomenology; it is difficult precisely because the very act of turning your attention towards a particular experience has the capacity to destroy that experience.6

The Mystery of Incarnate Being

“I can think about the object only if I acknowledge that I do not count for it, that it does not take me into account.” When we take a fully objective stance towards the world, we cut off our connection to the world. The world, perceived as object, ceases to be something involved with me and disregards me entirely—for objects do not take me into account. It is here that Marcel begins to unpack his own version of the existential attitude:

What this amounts to is that the act of trying to break the nexus uniting me to the universe, because of a fear of anthropocentrism, nexus of my presence to the world, my body being this nexus manifested, is a purely abstract act. [...] I am not postulating any kind of dependence of the universe on me; this would be a relapse to an extreme subjectivism. What I am asserting, first of all, is the primacy of the existential over the ideal, with the added proviso that the existential must inevitably be related to incarnate being, i.e. to the fact of being in the world. (p. 21, bold my own)

Our incarnate being, he says, is our “fundamental situation.” Our embodiment is not a contingent fact—there is no sense in attempting to say that I am embodied, but I could have been otherwise. This embodiment is inevitably related to the existential, not the ideal. Any philosophizing we do cannot begin with abstract concepts, but must begin with the concrete, real fact that is my embodied existence, my incarnate being.

As we have seen, this embodiment is a paradoxical experience. Although I cannot be distinguished from my body, I am capable of taking a stance that considers my body as an object. I can look upon my body with a mirror; I can divorce myself from it; ultimately I can attempt to disavow it, as one might disavow a friend or relative. Yet our reflections have shown that it is neither possible to identify myself with this body, nor to separate or distinguish myself from it. This mystery forms the basis for Marcel’s philosophy: the existential, the concrete, must always hold primacy over the ideal and the abstract. That is, we must begin with nothing other than our bodies.

The premises of what I venture to call concrete or existential philosophy have thus been established in a somewhat indirect and unexpected way. This philosophy is based on a datum which is not transparent to reflection, and which, when reflected, implies an awareness not of contradiction but of a fundamental mystery, becoming an antimony as soon as discursive thought tries to reduce or problematize it. (p. 23, bold my own)

An important distinction in Marcel’s philosophy is that between “problems” and “mysteries”. has a wonderful article in Commonweal that dives into this difference, which he summarizes as follows:

A problem is something external to us. It can be solved with the proper, generalizable technique. A mystery, on the other hand, is something from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Marcel called a mystery a “problem which encroaches upon its own data.” It has roots in the depths of our being, but it also reaches beyond us. There is no general technique for addressing a mystery. It can only be lived out with a wisdom responsive to the particulars of the situation and the people involved. Birth, love, and death are central mysteries for Marcel. The death of a child involves a parent in all three.

Problems are things which can be solved, reduced, done away with, set aside; mysteries must be lived. Our embodiment is one such mystery.7 We cannot escape it, we cannot reduce it to a mere tool nor reduce our subjectivity to it, it is simply to be experienced.

What, Then, With the Kiss of Love?

As we have seen, the body is fundamental to our very existence. We cannot be separated from our bodies, they constitute our very being, they are that something “by which I can be known or identified, either by another person or by myself.” What lessons can we take away from this?

For starters, I think these reflections help us to understand why there are five different commands in the New Testament for Christians to greet one another “with the kiss of love.” Consider a moment where you, in your own life, have felt particularly loved by a friend. It is eminently natural for us to describe such a moment as “touching”. Why? Because each of us to some degree recognize that I am not distinguishable from my body. A touching act is one which sneaks past our usual walls, leaps across roaring rivers, crosses the inner defenses of our being, and tells us that we are loved. Physically touching another person is an important and, all-too-often, forgotten way of—touching people! We are commanded to do this because our physicality is not a mere accident, it is a gift and it is fundamental to our existence as selves. Our bodies are not curses. We would do well to recognize that this, too, is “very good”.

There is a connection we miss when we read these commandments to kiss one another in translation: the word for kiss, φίλημα, shares the same root as that for friendship, φίλος. To kiss and to be a friend are so conceptually connected in the Ancient Greek world that they share the same root word. This is a fully embodied understanding of friendship. Do we view friendships as relationships important enough to kiss the other person? It seems we ought to—because in the language of the New Testament, these two ideas are tied together at their centers. Friendship mandated an awareness of the other person’s embodiment. How impoverished are we, who cannot see the value and the beauty of another person’s body without sexual desire being involved!

Indeed, if Marcel’s analysis is correct and incarnate being is the central datum of the human life, to love another person simply is to love their body. This is a scandalous thought for us, at least here in Texas where I grew up. I love my friends, sure, but their bodies?? “No, no y’see, loving another person’s body isn’t for friendship, that’s only for marriage.“ We, with Marcel, must recognize that this is not only wrong, but incoherent. Those whom I love may not be reducible to their bodies, but neither can they be separated from them. To imagine loving a person without loving their body is to imagine nothing at all.

Of course, this need not mean we literally kiss one another as a greeting—although that could be very cool!8—but it does mean we should consider how we can show love to one another in more physically incarnate ways. I think here of the earliest form of the Eucharist, which was much closer to a feast-meal with much food and drink and joyous laughter than what we have today. This is a physical care; humans cannot survive without food and drink. No less than Ecclesiastes, my favorite book of the Bible, says that this is the sum of meaning of the human life:

But there are also simpler things we can do to engage one another’s physicality without kissing one another.9 Hugs are excellent, for starters. And, if you’re comfortable holding hands during prayer, try holding hands with people you aren’t married to in other contexts! It’s really rather odd, if you stop and reflect a moment, that we’ve sexualized or romanticized holding hands with other people. Plenty of current-day cultures do not see it this way—everywhere from the Middle East, to Korea, to Sicily sees it fitting for friends to hold hands. And, if you’re not one for the touchy-feely forms, try sports! I think these would be excellent applications of “greet one another with the kiss of love” to our own context.

Now, I have written about the command to greet one another with a kiss before; if you want some expanded thoughts on the kiss of love, especially in connection with Kierkegaard, you can read that article here. Where I will end instead of repeating those thoughts is with the following. What does it say, what should it say to us, about the relationship between Christianity and the physical world that our two most important sacraments—baptism and the Eucharist—are so profoundly physical? For the one, we are eating and drinking, the acts which sustain and nourish the body; for the other, we partake in being born and reborn, life and new life. Should it not speak to us that, in the two most important rituals of the Christian liturgical life, God saw fit to reach down and nourish not only our souls, but our bodies too? If our bodies are good enough for God to bring into His life, should they not also be good enough for us? Shall we not rejoice in this most central fact of our being, that we are bodies?

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In particular, my studies served the purpose of preparing me for a talk I gave at my university last month; you can watch the recording here. I read one major book from each of the four thinkers we will discuss: Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Gabriel Marcel. In particular, the books I read were:

• Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus;

• Tillich’s The Courage to Be;

• Berdyaev’s The Divine and The Human;

• Marcel’s Creative Fidelity.

In this mini-series we will explore some of their commonalities, look for hidden resonances, and see where their worldviews clash—in other words, a comparative analysis. From the outset, I will note that I do my best to read books constructively and with an open mind. If you are hoping that I will constantly hand dueling pistols to the authors, I suggest you look elsewhere. No two people have the same worldview. We do not need to add conflict where it is not present; there will be conflict enough regardless.

More than anything else, what I see drawing these thinkers together is what Tillich calls the existential attitude:

We must first of all distinguish the existential attitude from philosophical or artistic Existentialism. The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence. This includes temporal, spatial, historical, psychological, sociological, biological conditions. And it includes the finite freedom which reacts to these conditions and changes them. An existential knowledge is a knowledge in which these elements, and therefore the whole existence of him who knows, participate. [...] There are realms of reality or—more exactly—of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. [...] But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. (Tillich, The Courage to Be, p. 115., italics my own)

For Tillich—and as we will see, for all of the thinkers mentioned—there are realms of knowledge which can only be experienced with the whole of my being. To “know” them without being changed would be a betrayal of my claiming to know it. This is most directly relevant to us in how we relate to ourselves.

The implicit view of oneself that we are handed is that of a small cog in a giant machine. Everyone from governments to tech corporations to universities has a vested interest in reducing us to a number in a spreadsheet—all for the sake of that omnipotent god, Efficiency. The more docility people show in accepting this premise, the better it is for the Powers that Be. This is exactly the mindset that existentialism in any form wants to shake us out of. We allow ourselves all too easily to become things instead of selves. “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.”2 If Kierkegaard wrote this in the 1840s, how much horror would he feel today?

Indeed, Kierkegaard is the man who started3 all of this existentialism business. One of his more famous phrases, “Subjectivity is truth!” sounds terrifying to our modern ears, but if we step back and read it in context we see that he means something rather similar to Tillich as above.

To start with, we must recognize that Kierkegaard does not believe we are fully selves yet. Subjectivity, becoming a subject, embracing all of our conditions—this is an art which no one has perfected. The pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes “...becoming subjective is the highest task assigned to a human being, [...] the task of becoming subjective is indeed assigned to every person.”4 This task, becoming subjective, is precisely the ethical task for human beings. This ethical is “not only a knowing; it is also a doing that is related to a knowing”.5 That is, ethical knowledge cannot simply be objective, mental; it must also transform our lives and our behaviors in accordance with it. Furthermore, the claim that “subjectivity is truth”6 is taking place only within the context of this ethical-religious knowledge:

It is always to be borne in mind that I am speaking of the religious, in which objective thinking, if it is supposed to be supreme, is downright irreligiousness. But wherever objective thinking is within its rights, its direct communication is also in order, precisely because it is not supposed to deal with subjectivity. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 76, fn., emphasis my own)

That objective thinking has its reality is not denied, but in relation to all thinking in which precisely subjectivity must be accentuated it is a misunderstanding. Even if a man his whole life through occupies himself exclusively with logic, he still does not become logic; he himself therefore exists in other categories.(Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 93, fn., emphasis my own)

“Subjectivity is truth!” is a true claim insofar as we speak of truths which engage the whole of my being. It is not true as regards mathematics, science, certain modes of history, etc. But this objectivizing stance, which we rightfully take in regards to mathematics or science, is the wrong stance to take as regards my own selfhood. Kierkegaard wants us to properly develop into subjects, into human beings; we must cast off the chains of objectivization. This casting off is ultimately the same thing as becoming Spirit—and “a human being is spirit.” (Sickness, p. 13)

Berdyaev opens his text The Divine and The Human with a meditation on the interplay between objectivization, subjectivity, and the divine revelation in history. God’s revelation in history has become an object or a series of objects—a fact both necessary for it to exist in the world, yet problematic for producing true spiritual life in humanity:

In the case of revelation, which is fundamental in the religious life, the same thing has happened as with all manifestations of the Spirit; it has been objectivized. The fact must be recognized that Christian revelation could not have played a social role and could not have become an impelling historical force unless it had been objectivized, that is to say, socialized and adapted to the level of the common masses. [...] Objectivization is a distortion of spirituality and at the same time objectivization is a necessity for the realization of the destinies of mankind and of the world, for movement towards the Kingdom of the Spirit! But on the way, the illusions and distortions of objectivization must be stripped off, there must be cleansing. And this is the mission of the prophetic side of religion and philosophy.
[...]
Revelation is the fact of the Spirit in me, in the subject; it is spiritual experience, spiritual life. [...] the manifestations of the Spirit in the lives of the apostles and saints were not of an intellectual character, the entire spiritual nature of man came into operation in them. (The Divine and The Human, p. 13-15)

For Berdyaev, true religious revelation is in the subjective. His critique of revelation is a critique from within. He wants to free the divine revelation that is the life of Christ from the naturalist and materialist distortions which have so long afflicted it. Spirit, he says, is never fully present in an object; Spirit may only be symbolized by objects. Objects are inherently finite, but Spirit is infinite creativity, freedom. This is essentially the basis for the apophatic impulse: if God is an Infinite Mystery, beyond all our understanding, no concepts or objects or any finite thing could wholly encapsulate the Divine Life.7

This freeing from materialist distortions does not, however, mean that we should ignore historical criticism. On the contrary, it is because historical criticism is only concerned with the objective that we must let it do its work to the fullest—nothing historical criticism can say has the power to determine matters of the Spirit. “No religion stands on a higher level than truth, for God is truth and is known in spirit and in truth.” (p. 16-17) Just as Kierkegaard saw realms where objectivity is necessary, so too does Berdyaev.

Marcel, as he so often does, concerns himself with how objectivization plagues our human relationships. Rending another soul as a mere object rips apart our ability to love not only the other person but also ourselves:

Let us return to our preceding remarks concerning the object: it is what does not take me into account, something for which I do not count. Conversely, I address the second person when what I address can respond to me in some way—and that response cannot be translated into words. [...] When I consider another individual as him, I treat him as essentially absent; it is his absence which allows me to objectify him, to reason about him as though he were a nature or given essence.
[...]
The being whom I love can hardly be a third person for me at all; yet he allows me to discover myself; my outer defenses fall at the same time as the walls separating me from the other person fall. (Creative Fidelity, p. 32-33)

Love, he says, is inconsistent with treating another person like a them over there, like an object. Much as Berdyaev sees an incongruity with objectivization and revelation, so Marcel sees an incongruity with objectivization and love. It is not simply ourselves we must cease to objectify, nor ourselves and God/revelation, but also other persons.

Going further, Marcel says true action occurs only when it engages the whole of our being. “An act, I shall maintain, is more an act to the degree that it is impossible to repudiate it without completely denying oneself...” (p. 109). Thus we return full circle to Tillich—truly being a person requires completely accepting oneself, engaging the whole of what it means to be human. Being human involves not only myself, my self, but other people, other selves. True engagement with another person, therefore, must make room for the whole of the other person within myself. I cannot objectify another person, reduce them to a set of ideas in my mind, or insist on projecting past conceptions onto their present or future self, and still claim to know them and be with them. If we do not know a person and cannot be present with that person, can we claim to love them? I think not. Presence requires a concrete, particular engagement with the other person, with the Thou as Marcel says, as they truly are. This is why love can always increase between people; we can only love another person insofar as we truly see them as they are.

Love is connected with personality, it is a relation between one personality and another. Love is really human when it is love not only for God in man, for what is perfect and beautiful in him, but also for man in God, for the unrepeatable individual, one who is dear to me independently of any perfection he may or may not have.” (The Divine and The Human, p. 125)

For me, all of this ties together in the acts of love and faith. The talk I gave was for an apologetics organization at my university. Often times, in the world of apologetics there is a tendency to reduce faith to a list of propositions that one mentally assents to. Kierkegaard, Marcel, Berdyaev and Tillich all say that this view of faith is a misunderstanding. In doing so, they are following the apostle James:

James 2:14-22: What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? ¹⁵ If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food ¹⁶ and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? ¹⁷ So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

¹⁸ But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from works, and I by my works will show you faith. ¹⁹ You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. ²⁰ Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is worthless? ²¹ Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? ²² You see that faith was active along with his works, and by works faith was brought to completion. (NRSVue)

Even the demons believe—and shudder. Mere propositional assent is granted to the demons, but this does not constitute faith! No, faith without works is dead, because true faith is a true act, in the Marcelian sense. True faith is an active faith, it is a faith which works, which transforms the whole of one’s being. It requires an active engagement with my concrete situation: if a brother or sister is lacking and we do not supply their needs, not only do we fail to love, but James says we fail to have faith.

Love is no different. What are the greatest commandments? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. “All your heart, soul, mind, and strength”—is this not precisely the existential engagement of Tillich which opened this article? And to love our neighbors as ourselves, we have seen that this requires a full existential engagement with both my own reality and personhood, and that of my neighbor. I can only love others insofar as I truly perceive them.

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There is so much talk about being offended by Christianity because it is so dark and gloomy, offended because it is so rigorous etc., but it would be best of all to explain for once that the real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man's goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought. [Anti-Climacus], The Sickness Unto Death, p. 83.

A lot of assumptions get made about one of my favorite authors. When he is spoken of at all, Kierkegaard is portrayed as a worryingly depressed figure, devoid of joy, of that which makes life worth living. No less than Theodor Adorno thought that “Kierkegaard even speaks of the happiness of eternity in such gloomy tones that it appears to consist of nothing but the giving away of any real claim to happiness.”1 People very often feel that Kierkegaard sees no goodness in man, nothing whatsoever worthy of retaining. And to some extent I understand that picture—but I believe it is a woefully incomplete one.

One source of this picture is assuredly Kierkegaard’s penchant for giving his books depressing titles. Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Anxiety...they’re all great band names, but they don’t inspire confidence in one that the author is mentally stable. Yet Kierkegaard’s own view of Christianity2 is that “...the real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high, because its goal is not man’s goal, because it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought.” Where, then, is the cause of discontinuity between this claim and the perception of Kierkegaard as anti-human?

As I have noted previously, part of the issue is simply that Kierkegaard is a complex author with a multifaceted corpus of texts. If you follow Adorno in giving every text equal weight in determining what Kierkegaard “really” thought, you get a picture replete with contradictions. This is not because Kierkegaard painted a picture replete with contradictions, however! Many of the texts are pseudonymical, representing differing viewpoints that SK wanted to vividly illustrate. The following quote, for example, gives an extraordinarily depressing viewpoint on life:

Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy. —Either/Or, Vol. 1.

But of course, this is not written under Kierkegaard’s own name—it is written under the pseudonym of the aesthete, one who values novelty above all else. He surely felt that it was true at some point or other in his life, but ascribing this to him as his true assessment of the world is a grave error.

The issues of pseudonymity are far from the only cause, however. There is a much broader issue when we come to texts with preconceived notions of the themes and forms and emotions that we will find. Fr. Christopher Poore recently wrote an excellent article on the dangers of homogenizing the Christian East and West; when we incorrectly universalize cultures and times and places, they become monolithic lies. What was once a sparkling, many-faceted gem is reduced to a single plane, hard and unyielding. Fr. Poore was addressing the homogenization of Eastern and Western eschatologies; I think we have the same issues when reading Kierkegaard.

It is true, of course, that Kierkegaard was a Lutheran; that his father was an astonishingly strict man; that myriad neuroses passed from father to son; that Kierkegaard struggled with a depression which could fill many lifetimes; that his Pietist upbringing is central to his view of the world. All of these elements are present in his work. But it seems to me that when we let this be the defining view of what Kierkegaard says to us, we miss out on key counterbalancing elements. Consider the following passage:

Just as only entities of the same kind can be added, so everything is qualitatively that by which it is measured, and that which is its qualitative criterion is ethically its goal; the criterion and goal are what define something, what it is, with the exception of the condition in the world of freedom, where by not qualitatively being that which is his goal and his criterion a person must himself have merited this disqualification. Thus the goal and the criterion still remain discriminatingly the same, making it clear just what a person is not—namely, that which is his goal and criterion.

[…]

Qualitatively, a self is what its criterion is. That Christ is the criterion is the expression, attested by God, for the staggering reality that a self has, for only in Christ is it true that God is man’s goal and criterion, or the criterion and goal. (The Sickness Unto Death, p. 79-80, 114, bold my own)

While it is certainly stated in a Lutheran Pietist register, in a book filled with the echoes of Kierkegaard’s strict upbringing and immense internal turmoil, this remains nothing less than a doctrine of theosis. “But theosis is an Eastern doctrine!” I hear you say. No! No, we must not engage in intellectual sophistry that replaces nuance with monolith. Kierkegaard says that the criterion and goal “are what define something, what it is”, and he says that in Christ, God is our criterion and goal. If we take this seriously, I do not see how we could read it as anything other than theosis.

It seems to me that moments like this, when an author subverts our expectations and our prior perceptions of who they are, are the most important moments in a book. If we forget our pretensions for a moment, does the above passage sound all that different from what Berdyaev says below?

In order to be completely like man it is necessary to be like God. It is necessary to have the divine image in order to have the human image. Man as we know him is to but a small extent human; he is even inhuman. It is not man who is human but God. It is God Who requires of man that he should be human; man on his part makes very little demand for it. [...] In this lies the mystery of God-manhood, the greatest mystery of human life. Manhood is God-manhood. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Divine and The Human, p. 110-111

Man on his part makes very little demand to be human—indeed Christianity offends men because the goal of Christianity is far higher than that which man naturally seeks. Berdyaev was influenced by Kierkegaard, of course; that is part of why they are resonant. Yet we give Berdyaev carte blanche to speak of “Eastern” doctrines like theosis, while Kierkegaard could not possibly believe such a thing because of...geography?

If we want ecumenical progress to move forward, then we must not constrain our views of theologians because of their background, their upbringing, their birthplace, etc.; our prior perceptions for a thinker should be held loosely at best and discarded when necessary. There is no use pretending that the “West” and the “East” are unified viewpoints which can in good faith always be spoken of monolithically. Are there particular resonances which are drawn out in some traditions more than others? Of course. But we should not make the mistake of boxing in thinkers because a teacher handed us their work with pre-attached labels like “Pietist” or “Orthodox” or “Evangelical.” Collapsing the nuances of an individual into a denominational identity is a travesty.

This refusal to collapse an author into our preconceived notions of them is ultimately a work of love. We can only be said to truly love a person if we love that person, and not our idea of that person. What makes all loving relationships difficult is a continual revelation that my perception of the other person was incorrect; I have to continually adjust my own personhood as I come to understand the other. The same principle of hermeneutical charity ought to apply in our ecumenical strivings. This is true regardless of whether those strivings are in the form of reading thinkers outside one’s own tradition, or that of loving a friend with whom we have deep disagreement. Indeed, the authors of the past are no less persons, no less my neighbor than those who are before me in the present. Should we not strive to love in all things?

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Brief Biographical Portrait

Hummel was born in 1778 in Pressburg (now named Bratislava, Slovakia) under Habsburg rule. Born to a musical father, he was a child prodigy, studying under Mozart and Haydn before turning 13. His father took him on a concert tour of Europe, including a visit to London where he studied under Clementi. Once he returned to Vienna, Johann became friends with Beethoven; together the two were recognized as up-and-coming virtuosos of the piano.

In 1804 Hummel took the position of Konzertmeister for Nikolaus II, Prince Esterházy, where Haydn was Kapellmeister. Because of the latter’s failing health, Hummel took over many of the duties of Kapellmeister without taking the title, out of respect for Haydn; Haydn eventually died in 1809. Hummel would later take several other Kapellmeister positions, including Stuttgart from 1816-1818 and Weimar from 1819 until his death. This position in Weimar led to a friendship with Goethe. The musicologist Mark Kroll notes in his biography of Hummel that he also laid the foundation for modern intellectual property and copyright law:

Hummel, nevertheless, left us many legacies that can truly be called “everlasting.” One was his role as a precedent-setting visionary who firmly established the important principles of intellectual property and copyright law. As we have seen, Hummel complained bitterly and often about unethical publishers who copied publications of his music brought out by a reputable firm like Peters or Haslinger and sold them as their own. (Kroll, Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician’s Life and World, p. 337)

Although Hummel is most properly viewed as a proto-Romantic, his music began to go out of style due to his continued classicism and Clementi-esque technique. Although many respected him, and his legacy appeared secure, this downward turn only hastened with time, and once the 19th century closed he was mostly unknown, in the shadows of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt.

Hummel’s repertoire is notable for two things: his focus on the piano—perhaps not so surprising for a piano virtuoso—and the conspicuous lack of a symphony. All of his orchestral writing was done in the form of concerti and similar. With that in mind, we begin with

Piano Concerto No. 2 in A minor, Op. 85

I am torn between choosing this piece and the 3rd piano concerto, in B minor, as Hummel’s representative piano concerto—both of them are favorites of mine. Both are notable for their influence on the first fully Romantic composers: I believe Schumann often performed the 2nd and Liszt the 3rd. Both of them sound much more proto-Romantic than their placement in the historical-musical timeline might have you believe. Structurally and musically, they both sound like a late Beethoven concerto to me rather than a Mozart or a Haydn. There is only room for one, so I have chosen the A minor, but you must listen to both of them!

The A minor is particularly notable for the explosive pianistic virtuosity it demands of the soloist. There is not much material in the repertoire before Hummel that makes such technical demands of the piano, or keyboard instruments in general. Representative of this is this page, from the end of the first movement:

This is the only piece I am aware of where a pianist is expected to essentially play a staccato drone note—in this case, A above the treble staff—while simultaneously playing a chromatic scale with the same hand. If you want to see what this looks like live, the pianist Dmitry Shishkin has a concert video recording which I have linked below, and the above page begins at 15:25.

Trumpet Concerto in Eb Major, S. 49

A friend of mine—you know who you are—threatened to hold me at gunpoint until I put this piece in this article, so here it is. And although I am putting it here under...strained conditions, it is nonetheless justified in its place, as it is a standard virtuoso piece for the trumpet. If anyone has heard a trumpet concerto, it is likely this one. Of particular note to my non-trumpet-playing ear is the extended lines of repeated notes in the Rondo movement. I am not much qualified to speak on this one, beyond saying that I really like it, and I expect you will too. The Rondo is especially bouncy and fun. Oh, and as your required dose of impostor syndrome for the day—the soloist in this recording was around 16 when this was recorded.

Septet No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 74

This piece remained in the standard repertoire for much longer than most of Hummel’s other work, and I can see why. It feels almost symphonic in nature to me—the septet is scored for piano, flute, oboe, french horn, viola, cello, and double bass, and at ~35 minutes it is the full length of a symphony for the period.

The piano part is again quite difficult, with many runs of octave jumps and arpeggiated chords. To my ear it sounds particularly Romantic in style, even as it uses a lot of the standard classical techniques and forms. The menuetto is pleasantly bouncy, and I hear similarities with some of the motifs (both musical and technical) that Alkan uses in his Op. 39 Etudes composed a few decades later. Although I only heard this piece for the first time while researching Hummel, I think it is well worth a spot in your listening catalog.

Mandolin Concerto in G Major, S. 28

The final piece I want to discuss in some depth is this lovely little concerto Hummel wrote for the mandolin in 1799. I am not much familiar with the mandolin as an instrument, but I think Hummel makes use of its timbre quite artfully. This concerto, scored for a smaller group than most concerti, has a very strong Mozartean-Haydnesque flavor to it, especially in comparison with some of Hummel’s later work. All three movements are bright and playful, with the mandolin evoking a trip I once took to Italy—of my travel there, Venice in particular seems suited to this piece somehow.

Honorable Mentions

As with last time, some two-sentence blurbs:

• Piano Concerto No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 89. As mentioned, I don’t have much of a justification for not picking this one over the A minor. Go listen to it! I am particularly partial to Stephen Hough’s recordings with the English Chamber Orchestra for both this and the A minor as well.

• Potpourri, Op. 53. Written for guitar and piano, this piece will give you a little bit of everything, as the name suggests. I do not often run across music focusing on the guitar before Albeniz, so this was a pleasure to discover.

• Piano Sonata No. 5 in F# Minor, Op. 81. This piece, were I to cover it fully, deserves an article of its own, but I do not feel equipped to do it justice and therefore have placed it here. It is a wonderful sonata, and had an effect on several of the up-and-coming Romantic composers. It is worth comparing this sonata to Robert Schumann’s Op. 8 Allegro and Chopin’s B minor sonata—both of the latter clearly owe something to this sonata of Hummel’s.

Summary

In all, I think Hummel deserves a spot amongst the earliest of Romantics alongside Beethoven, whose work similarly mixes the boundary between Classical and Romantic. His technical mastery of the piano is apparent, and his orchestration is quite strong; I hope that one day the 2nd and 3rd piano concerti especially will make a return to the mainline repertoire.

And for what? To travel, to get from place A to place B, a utilitarian exercise. Man has outgrown that station of his so long thought natural; man now outraces even the gods. Zephyr and Boreas can do naught but wave a greeting as this chariot of metal and flame cuts through them. Apollo, reduced to a mere bystander, shudders in jealousy. The eagle, rightful lord of the skies, slowly wheels off beneath me, knowing that mankind has usurped his throne. Have we really become so desensitized to our own power? Do my fellow passengers truly not see that we have surpassed not only Nature, but the gods of ancient bygone days?

All this comes with great cost. Man has martyred much for this throne. Much of it was not ours to sacrifice. We have expanded our dominion at breakneck speed: one would be forgiven for thinking that humanity’s recent motto is “move fast and break things.” Technology has advanced with astonishing pace in the past two centuries, giving us new wonders of agriculture, transportation, medicine, and communication. These are, in themselves, good things. The issue comes not with new technology but the poor use of new technology. Much like a teenager, consequences are a foreign thought to humanity’s recent masters. We have raised the floor of living for billions of people, it is true: without technology we could not treat cancer, fly across an ocean in six hours, or have enough food for 10 billion people. Yet these wonders have done immense damage to our world. The cost of that food production is ecosystems across the world turned into desolate monoculture wastelands, sustained by fertilizer and the machine. Demeter lies in sackcloth and ashes; Pan has nowhere to live. Only God knows how many thousands of species of animal is lost to time forever. The food that is produced by these practices is not shared equally. Billions remain hungry and malnourished. The ballroom of the sky is ever-more tarnished by excretions of vehicles and factories. The sea rises, acid rain falls, man remains hungry, man continues onward.

Humanity’s old foes, inequality and war, continue abreast. If anything they are stronger, more entrenched in their positions than before. Tech billionaires build super-yachts off the backs of child slaves mining cobalt in the Congo. The internet is a blessing; our methods of sustaining it are from hell. The eight wealthiest people in the world have the same net worth as the poorest four billion. Is this really how we believe the world ought to be?

And our capacity for war has reached new horrors. A thousand years prior, wars were primarily fought by professional armies. Civilians were only endangered when an army was physically at their door; peasant militias were used sparingly and avoided if possible. War was not total war in that time. But in our time, much the same technology which allowed me to see the clouds was used by my country to kill a quarter of a million Japanese civilians in 1945. In two quick flashes, thousands of families disappeared forever. War is total, now; it is such because man has taken domain of the sky. Ares laughs as his domain expands, no longer bound to land and sea. We rip out the entrails of the earth and use them for warheads.

The easy way out of this evil is to cede it to hell and consign mankind to Hades. I myself am tempted by this option; the thought of moving to a cabin in the woods, burying my head in the sand, and telling everyone else “good luck!” holds a certain appeal. It is much easier to notice technological destruction than technological life-bearing. For many, AI has furthered the impulse to run in horror at the things which humanity hath wrought. Yet it is, ultimately, the path of a coward. The harder path is to stare evil in the face, recognize its existence with clear eyes, and hold our ground, proclaiming the good that nonetheless happens in and through humanity. Ceding humanity and technology to evil is to give up on the human. For Christians like myself, giving up on the human is a forbidden move—how can we give up on humanity when God himself became human? No, we must preach a “full-bodied humanism” alongside Paul VI, alongside Berdyaev and the Russian Silver Age, alongside the German Romantics, recognizing evil as evil and good as good. If we truly believe in the promises of Christianity, then fear has no place in determining our actions. Berdyaev even goes so far as to say that “emancipation from fear is the chief spiritual task of man.”1 In my heart of hearts, I wish to stand with these great men and defend man from man—defend man from the charges that man brings against him. We are capable of great evil, yes, but also great good. So revel in the clouds, I say! Revel in the glories that we have brought about, and in our newfound power; only do your best to use this responsibility wisely, in whatever capacity you have.

Matthew 22:39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Today we continue our read-along of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. If you haven’t read them yet and want to catch up, here are links to the first and most recent articles on this chapter:

As we saw in part III, Kierkegaard presented us with a sort of summary for what the rest of the chapter will explore:

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.

In part III, we focused on love becoming “eternally secured” by love becoming duty. In part IV, we focused on the two ways love can be changed—love can be changed within itself and for itself. We also saw how love, when it becomes duty, is secured against those changes. In part V, we turned to seeing how love is “eternally made free in blessed independence.” We finish off the chapter by considering the final phrase, how love may be “eternally and happily secured against despair.”

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair. Spontaneous love can become unhappy, can reach the point of despair. [...] The despair is due to relating oneself with infinite passion to a particular something, for one can relate oneself with infinite passion—unless one is in despair—only to the eternal. Spontaneous love is in despair in this way, but when it becomes happy, as it is called, its being in despair is hidden from it; when it becomes unhappy, it becomes manifest that it was in despair. (p. 40)

Now, the term “despair” is primarily a term-of-art in Kierkegaard’s works. It is not all that related to something like “depression” in modern parlance (although despair can be the root cause depression, and he does occasionally use it in this more colloquial sense)—rather, a person is in despair when they are in a misrelation to themselves, the world, or God. There is not room here to give a full account of despair; the interested reader should turn to The Sickness Unto Death, which is the most expansive text on the concept. (Spoiler: the sickness unto death is despair.) I will, however, attempt a brief overview.

In Kierkegaard’s anthropology, humans are a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine. Humans fall into despair precisely when they relate to finite things as though they were infinite, human things as though they were divine, or when they relate to infinite things as though they were finite, etc.1 Despair is a failure to properly understand what it means to be a human person. Here, Kierkegaard speaks of the way that spontaneous love can fall into despair. It can relate to a particular person as though they were absolute, as though they were the eternal. A person who falls into despair through spontaneous love believes that the beloved is more important than even God himself. This despair can be hidden from the loving one as long as he has the beloved, but the moment his love becomes unhappy, loses the beloved, etc., it becomes clear by his despairing over his loss that his love always was in despair:

Yet this, that spontaneous love can reach the point of despair, shows that it is in despair, that even when it is happy it loves with the power of despair—loves another person “more than itself, more than God.” Of despair it must be said: Only that person can despair who is in despair. When spontaneous love despairs over misfortune, it only becomes manifest that it was in despair, that in its happiness it had also been in despair. (p. 40)

That is, if someone in spontaneous love relates to the beloved as though they were the highest, that love is already in despair. This may not be clear to the loving one, until tragedy or misfortune brings him to his knees and he becomes aware that his God, the beloved, is no longer with him.

In contrast, the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty can never despair, simply because it is not in despair. That is to say, despair is not something that can happen to a person, an event such as good fortune and misfortune. Despair is a misrelation in a person’s innermost being—no fate or event can penetrate so far and so deep; it can only make manifest that the misrelation—was there. For this reason there is only one security against despair: to undergo the change of eternity through duty’s shall. [...] Despair is to lack the eternal; despair is not to have undergone the change of eternity through duty’s shall. Despair is not, therefore, the loss of the beloved—that is unhappiness, pain, suffering—but despair is the lack of the eternal. (p. 40-41)

As I understand it, here SK is speaking only of what despair looks like within the context of selfish love. Those of you who have already read Sickness will recall that there, Anti-Climacus also speaks of despair which is despair because it lacks finitude, not the infinite or eternal. But here, it seems, selfish love can only fall into a misrelation by relating absolutely to something relative or finite, instead of only relating absolutely to the absolute or eternal. Only by taking up duty’s shall do we relate properly to the eternal reality of love. I expect later on, we will address love falling into despair by relating to God, the absolute, in a relative, finite manner—but SK has not done so here.

This also begins to point at something which ties back into my thesis from last time, that Kierkegaard should be read as deeply mystical. We are told that we must relate properly to the eternal and the temporal. What is the eternal in this context? That we shall love, in other words, that we must never disconnect ourselves from love. We must be always united with love. Love is the eternal, the highest. But only God is the highest—indeed, God is love (1 John 4), a claim which Kierkegaard takes very seriously, as we will see throughout the book. Once these two thoughts are connected, it seems to me that Kierkegaard is arguing for a mystical unity of the individual with Love, with God. Exactly what this unity entails is not yet clear, of course, but nonetheless there seems to be something of the sort happening here.

SK wants to make it very clear to us that by securing love against despair, he does not mean that we are to not “take things too harshly” or to not have deep experiences of anguish when losing someone—nothing so callously evil as that. On the contrary:

How, then, is the commandment’s love secured against despair? Very simply, by the commandment, by this “You shall love.” [...] Essentially the commandment is not forbidding but commanding, that you shall love. Therefore love’s commandment does not secure against despair by means of feeble, lukewarm grounds of comfort—that one must not take something too hard, etc. Indeed, is such a wretched sagacity, which “has ceased to sorrow,” any less despair than the lover’s despair; is it not rather an even worse kind of despair! No, love’s commandment forbids despair—by commanding one to love. (p. 41, bold my own)

SK tells us that such advice that we ought not get “too invested” in someone, lest we suffer should we lose them, is an even stronger form of despair than the lover’s despair. I remain continually baffled that Adorno and those who follow him are capable of reading a passage such as this and coming away with the message that Kierkegaard wants us to be emotionless robots!

Here again SK reflects on the stringency, the upbuilding quality of this command:

When it is made impossible to possess the beloved in time, eternity says, “You shall love”—that is, eternity then saves love from despair by making it eternal. Suppose it is death that separates the two—then what will be of help when the survivor would sink in despair? Temporal help is an even more lamentable kind of despair; but then eternity helps. When it says, “You shall love,” it is saying, “Your love has an eternal worth.” But it does not say it comfortingly, since that would not help; it says it commandingly precisely because there is imminent danger. (p. 41)

It is a remarkably strange thought, to say to someone “you shall love” precisely when they are despairing over losing a loved one. Yet this is what the command does! Because God is love, love is the ultimate ground of reality, indeed is ultimate reality—which makes it possible to love even one who has passed away. The strangeness of this thought, to not console him who grieves but instead to upbuild him rigorously; SK takes this strangeness to be proof of its divine origin. I certainly would not ever think to say to someone, “You shall love,” when they grieve for another. Yet any attempt to say “Console yourself” would fall meaninglessly to the ground. Only by embracing this shall can we secure love against despair. “The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair.” (p. 42)

We then get a hint to the manner in which SK sees the eternal, neighbor-love, etc., affecting our other more human loves:

See, passion inflames, worldly sagacity cools, but neither this heat nor this cold nor the combination of this heat and this cold is the pure air of the eternal. There is something inciting in this heat, and there is something sharp in this cold, and in the combination there is something indefinite, or an unconscious treachery, as in the dangerous time of spring. But this “You shall love” removes all the unhealthiness and preserves the healthiness for eternity. So it is everywhere, this shall of eternity is the saving, the purifying, the ennobling element. (p. 42, bold my own)

From this we see that eternity’s shall does not remove, ardor, joy, etc., from love, but rather removes the unhealthy elements that exist within purely passionate love. We are not supposed to become apathetic, as the Stoics would have us do; we must proceed on in love while recognizing the duty we have to love.

I could try to tie this last section up myself, but frankly I think I would do a disservice to you, dear reader, if I did anything other than let SK finish off this chapter for us himself. It is an achingly beautiful reflection on our responsibility to allow the emotions of love, of grief, of life itself wash over us. We may not become insensitive to life’s pain; we may not love despairingly; we may not warp the feelings of love within ourselves;—because it is our duty to love as finite, creaturely, emotional selves.

Sit with someone who deeply mourns. If you have the ability to give to passion the expression of despair as not even the sorrowing one can do, it may soothe for a moment—but it is still false. If you have the sagacity and experience to provide a temporary prospect where the sorrowing one sees none, it can be refreshingly tempting for a moment—but it is still false. But this “You shall sorrow” is both true and beautiful. I do not have the right to become insensitive to life’s pain, because I shall sorrow; but neither do I have the right to despair, because I shall sorrow; and neither do I have the right to stop sorrowing, because I shall sorrow. So it is with love. You do not have the right to become insensitive to this feeling, because you shall love; but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, because you shall love; and just as little do you have the right to warp this feeling in you, because you shall love. You shall preserve love, and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love. Wherever the purely human wants to storm forth, the commandment constrains; wherever the purely human loses courage, the commandment strengthens; wherever the purely human becomes tired and sagacious, the commandment inflames and gives wisdom. The commandment consumes and burns out the unhealthiness in your love, but through the commandment you will in turn be able to rekindle it when it, humanly speaking, would cease. Where you think you can easily go your own way, there take the commandment as counsel; where you despairingly want to go your own way, there take the commandment as counsel; but where you do not know what to do, there the commandment will counsel so that all turns out well nevertheless. (p. 43)

Postlude, Summary, etc.

Before we go on to Chapter IIb, I plan to take a little break from Works of Love to get a couple essays on other topics out. I want to try my hand at writing some shorter pieces on some of the other books I’ve been reading, along with returning to some writing on music. But this series will return, worry not.

We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. In part I, we saw that the true nature of the self is both self and other, which makes the true nature of love a stepping outside of myself and into another person—only to discover myself there. In part II, we saw that the nature of love must be grounded in something beyond mere feelings, drives, inclinations. And in parts III-VI, we saw how love can be “eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.”

If nothing else, reading this chapter so closely was highly generative for me, and I hope it was for you as well. For myself, I look forward to pursuing this reading of Kierkegaard-as-mystic when we return. “Wherever the purely human wants to storm forth, the commandment constrains; wherever the purely human loses courage, the commandment strengthens; wherever the purely human becomes tired and sagacious, the commandment inflames and gives wisdom.” This inflaming faintly echoes the mystical frenzy of Socrates, whom Kierkegaard loved so much. I would love to hear any main takeaways you had from this chapter as a whole in the comments below.

Matthew 22:39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Today we continue our read-along of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. If you haven’t read them yet and want to catch up, here are links to the first and most recent articles on this chapter:

• Chapter IIa Part I

• Chapter IIa Part II

• Chapter IIa Part III

• Chapter IIa Part IV

As we saw in part III, Kierkegaard presented us with a sort of summary for what the rest of the chapter will explore:

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.

In part III, we focused on love becoming “eternally secured” by love becoming duty. Last time, in part IV, we focused on the two ways love can be changed—love can be changed within itself and for itself. We also saw how love, when it becomes duty, is secured against those changes. This week, we turn to seeing how love is “eternally made free in blessed independence.”

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Kierkegaard showed us last time that love, for it to remain true love, must retain “its ardor, its joy, its desire, its originality, its freshness.” (p. 36) If we truly want to keep love—and anyone who has experienced love knows that love is worth keeping, indeed is the gift worth keeping above every other gift—then we must not allow it to fall into disrepair. We cannot become habituated to the glory of another person; no, we must continue seeing the face of God through them.

This leads us to a trap, however. It is alluringly easy to ground one’s love in receiving particular things, especially those which upbuild love’s ardor, joy, and freshness. We say in our hearts, “I will continue loving you—as long as you remain beautiful to me.” This is perhaps the most assiduous, asinine aspect of all that comes from the gamification of romance. Humanity like never before has access to millions of other people on Tinder and Hinge, whom they can choose to swipe left or right on based on a few photos and a meager sentence or two. What is meant to foster love often begins with the highest form of selfish preference.1

This form of love-as-exchange is obviously banal, but there are more secretive forms of it, too. Many well-meaning people would say that they experience a need for the love of the beloved, or of a friend—and thereby say that they will only continue loving the friend or the beloved if they receive that love. This, too, grounds the reality of their love on receiving something from that other.

Kierkegaard, at first, seems to say to us that this basis of “love-for-love” is real and good:

On the contrary, we have pointed out above that the expression of the greatest riches is to have a need; therefore, that it is a need in the free person is indeed the true expression of freedom. The one in whom love is a need certainly feels free in his love, and the very one who feels totally dependent, so that he would lose everything by losing the beloved, that very one is independent. (p. 38)

And indeed, SK tells us back in chapter one that need, to have a need, signifies both “the utmost misery” and “the greatest riches” (p. 10). To need love, to need companionship is central to human nature—we will explore this in more detail in Chapter IV. It appears so far that SK praises needing another person. But we must be careful, for the ethical reality follows immediately behind, and we cannot escape love’s shall:

[...] that very one is independent. Yet on one condition, that he does not confuse love with possessing the beloved. If someone were to say “Either love or die” and thereby mean that a life without loving is not worth living, we would completely agree. But if by the first he understood possessing the beloved and thus meant either to possess the beloved or die, either win this friend or die, then we must say that such a misconceived love is dependent. As soon as love, in its relation to its object, does not in that relation relate itself just as much to itself, although it still is entirely dependent, it is dependent in a false sense, it has the law of its existence outside itself and is dependent in a corruptible, in an earthly, in a temporal sense. (p. 38, bold my own)

If love is as valuable as we all take it to be, then we must protect it from being corruptible, right? What Kierkegaard wants us to recognize is that any impulse which says “if you cease to love me, then I shall cease to love you” makes love dependent—on someone or something else, on an external reality. But love which takes eternity’s shall into itself, that love depends only on this shall and is therefore eternally secured; it is dependent on an internal reality. “Spontaneous love makes a person free and at the next moment dependent. [...] Duty, however, makes a person dependent and at the same moment eternally independent.” (p. 38) When we love spontaneously (and when this is taken to the extreme), we are free to love based on our preferences, but that love immediately becomes dependent upon those preferences being fulfilled. When we love according to this shall, love is dependent on this command, but then eternally free from any external conditions taking away our love.

We might expect (or at least I did), based on this shall, that the person who takes eternity’s command into his love no longer experiences the need for reciprocal love, the need for the other. What I find so fascinating in Kierkegaard’s account here is that he follows up this security of love through the shall by noting precisely the opposite—that the loving one still has need for the other person!

Sometimes the world praises the proud independence that thinks it has no need to feel loved, even thought it also thinks it “needs other people—not in order to be loved by them but in order to love them, in order to have someone to love.” How false this independence is! It feels no need to be loved and yet needs someone to love; therefore it needs another person—in order to gratify its proud self-esteem. [...] But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty certainly feels a need to be loved, and therefore this need is eternally in harmonizing agreement with this shall; but it can to without, if so it shall be, while it still continues to love—is this not independence? (p. 39, italics original, bold my own)

In other words, for Kierkegaard it is not only good but necessary for love to desire being loved—yet in such a way that receiving love does not change my own love for the other person. In this way my love gains stability, it becomes independent.

Kierkegaard, a mystic?

I mentioned last time that Theodor Adorno and those who have followed him have, in my view, failed to understand Kierkegaard’s view of love. As I’ve meditated on the reading in this section, I have become more certain that Adorno is wrong, and I believe it is worth unpacking more of exactly where he misses the point. This is in service of a new thesis that I am gradually coming around to: Kierkegaard was a mystic—or at least, profoundly mystical.2 We will only begin to sketch this thesis here. I plan to gradually build it up (or tear it down, if need be) as we go along.

Adorno addresses our book most explicitly in his article fittingly entitled On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love.3 After insulting Kierkegaard’s religious writing as “continually repeating itself,” threatening the reader with “loquacious boredom”,4 Adorno summarizes Works of Love as follows:

In Kierkegaard’s doctrine the “Christian” content of love, its justification in eternity, is determined only by the subjective qualities of the loving one, such as disinterestedness, unlimited confidence, unobtrusiveness, mercifulness, even if one is helpless oneself, self-denial and fidelity. In Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love, the individual is important only with respect to the universal human. But the universal consists in the very fact of individualization. Hence love can grasp the universal only in love for the individual, but without yielding to the differences between individuals. In other words, the loving one is supposed to love the individual particularities of each man, but regardless of the differences between men. [...] Kierkegaard’s love is a breaking down of nature, moreover, as a breaking down of any individual interest of the lover, however sublimated it may be. The idea of happiness is kept aloof from this love as its worst disfigurement. Kierkegaard even speaks of the happiness of eternity in such gloomy tones that it appears to consist of nothing but the giving away of any real claim to happiness. (Adorno, p. 415-416, bold my own)

One would be forgiven for questioning at times whether Adorno knew how to read. The most egregious example occurs a page later:

Perhaps one may most accurately summarize Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love by saying that he demands that love behave towards all men as if they were dead. (Adorno, p. 416-417)

Perhaps it is just me, but when I read that it is my duty to continue loving the neighbor with all ardor, desire, freshness, originality, and joy (p. 37), I don’t get the sense that SK demands I treat those in my life as if they were dead. Of course, Adorno is responding to the work as a whole, and this quip is a reference to Chapter IX of the second series, entitled The Work of Love in Recollecting One who is Dead. We will get there in time, dear reader; what remains is that Adorno fails to see just how invigorating and life-giving Kierkegaard views love as. Perhaps as a consequence of Adorno only having access to German translations of questionable quality; perhaps as a consequence of Kierkegaard being somewhat unknown even in Adorno’s time; nonetheless Adorno completely misses the mark when he says that SK speaks of happiness in gloomy tones.

We must fight with all our strength against the forces of habit, which threaten to take away love’s ardor, freshness, and joy—is this the gloomy tone of one who believes we should love all men as if dead? Au contraire, part of remaining within love’s duty is sustaining our own need for the other person, for the love of the other person. We are not forbidden from desiring communion with persons—rather, we are to desire that person and their love, while simultaneously recognizing that our duty to love springs from God himself, not from any finite expression of love we receive. With these two things in mind, we begin to see the mystical vision that undergirds much of Kierkegaard’s thought. Consider these three passages:

Love’s hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love.

God is closer to us than our own soul, for he is the foundation on which our soul stands... For our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is naturally rooted in endless love.

God is in man, and in God is all. And he who loves thus loves all...

The first is, of course from Works of Love (p. 9). The latter two are from Julian of Norwich’s Showings. There is further resonance with the idea that God is closer to us than our own souls found in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, where the fully actualized self is seen to rest transparently in that which grounds it (i.e., in God’s love). This unity of self and the world through love is a common enough theme in mystical traditions of all kinds—I can only remain surprised that so few have noticed it running through Kierkegaard’s thought as well.

If our love originates in God’s love, and love also must retain its joy and desire and freshness—is there not in this something of the divine madness found in the Phaedrus?

Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness, which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.

Every interaction with love, with beauty, with life itself causes us to fly upward out of ourselves and plunge inward beneath ourselves to the source of all that is Good and True and Beautiful—God. We should not be so shocked to see Kierkegaard as a mystic, either. He was raised within the Lutheran Pietistic tradition, which has its own strain of mystic thought through Jacob Boehme, and he was intimately familiar with the thought of Franz von Baader as well. Indeed in several places, Kierkegaard presupposes that his readership is familiar with Baader’s writing. All this makes me wonder why so many readers of SK have been reticent to read him as a mystic alongside his ethical rigor. (If you want to explore more of the Lutheran mystical tradition, has done some wonderful writing on the topic, e.g., this article.)

As usual for this series, we will pick up next time where we left off, which is:

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair. (p. 40)

If you have any thoughts, I would enjoy reading them down below in the comments. I would love to know what you guys think of this mystical reading which I am hastily sketching at—is it strained, is it reasonable? And as always, thanks for reading.

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Matthew 22:39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Today we continue our read-along of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. If you haven’t read them yet and want to catch up, here are links to the previous articles on this chapter:

• Chapter IIa Part I

• Chapter IIa Part II

• Chapter IIa Part III

As we saw in part III, Kierkegaard presented us with a sort of summary for what the rest of the chapter will explore:

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.

Last week, we focused on love becoming “eternally secured” by love becoming duty. This week, we will turn to the second part of the constituent phrase—namely, that when love becomes a duty, it becomes eternally secured against every change. Mercifully, this is a shorter section, and I expect the remaining section(s) of Chapter IIA will also not be quite as draining as the first three.

By this shall love is also eternally secured against every change. The love that has only existence can be changed; it can be changed within itself and it can be changed from itself. (p. 34, italics original)

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Kierkegaard discusses two ways wherein love may be changed within itself: it may be changed from love into hatred; and it may be changed from love into jealousy. First we consider hatred:

Spontaneous love can be changed within itself; it can be changed into its opposite, into hate. Hate is a love that has become its opposite, a love that has perished [gaae til Grunde]. Down in the ground [i Grunden] the love is continually aflame, but it is the flame of hate; not until the love has burned out is the flame of hate also put out. (p. 34)

We can all identify with this experience, I think. It is sorely tempting to give hurt or betrayal its way, transmuting love into its opposite. Think of someone who has betrayed you: how easy it would be, to hate that person in your heart! Although we may not realize it, SK tells us hate can only exist through love. We can only truly hate someone we once loved, and indeed still love—but hate is the allowance of our love to be fixated upon anger, or suffering.

Just as it is said of the tongue that “it is the same tongue with which we bless and curse,” so it may also be said that it is the same love that loves and hates. But just because it is the same love, for that very reason it is not in the eternal sense the true love, which remains, unchanged, the same, whereas that spontaneous love, when it is changed, is still basically the same. (p. 34)

Think of how many great (and not-so-great) works of storytelling feature an enemies-to-lovers dynamic in some form: Much Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice, every rom-com to ever exist, etc. So many of our most compellingly human works focus on the transmutation between love and hate. Kierkegaard will tell us a little later on that what we are calling “spontaneous love,” Elskov, is tied to passion:

Erotic love and friendship are related to passion, but all passion, whether it attacks or defends itself, fights in one way only, either/or: “Either I exist and am the highest, or I do not exist at all, either all or nothing.” (p. 45)

It is this passion which remains “basically the same” within spontaneous love. As we saw earlier, spontaneous love, without kjerlighed to temper it, can become essentially an act of selfish love; at its worst, it is an expression of pure preference. I think this corresponds to passion of a sort—the passionate one becomes so overwhelmed by feeling that he must have the object of his passion, whether the object wants to be his or not! My limited understanding of the role of passion within Kierkegaard’s thought is that it constitutes something more foundational than simple “strong emotion,” but is instead a basic, powerful disposition towards the world. They are closely tied to the internal life of each of us, to our subjectivity—but that’s a topic for a later article.1 What SK warns us against here is that this spontaneous love, if it does not become duty and therefore unchanging, always has within itself and its passion the possibility of becoming hatred. This is the first way in which love may be changed “within itself.”

True love which has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty, is never changed; it is simple, it loves and never hates, never hates—the beloved. (p. 34)

This changelessness of love-bound-by-duty, says Kierkegaard, makes it far more powerful than the purely passionate love which says “If you will not love me, then I will hate you.” When love becomes a duty, it always loves and never hates, because it cannot do anything but love.

The other way in which love may be transformed within itself is by becoming jealousy:

Spontaneous love can be changed within itself; by spontaneous combustion it can become the sickness of jealousy; from the greatest happiness it can become the greatest torment. [...] If love kindles itself with this poison instead of expelling it, then the sickness of jealousy [Iversyge, zeal-sickness] sets in. As the word itself suggestion, it is a zeal for becoming sick, a sickness from zeal. The jealous person does not hate the object of love—far from it, but he tortures himself with the flame of reciprocal love that, purifying, should cleanse his love. (p. 35)

This poison, spontaneity, must be expelled. As we saw, spontaneity can quickly cause love to become hatred; it can also cause love to turn to jealousy. The jealous person catches and measures the love he receives from the beloved; he becomes nearly a scientist or a statistician of love, doling out exactly as much as he receives, and becoming enraged when the beloved bestows love on others. As SK says, “Jealousy loves as it is loved” (p. 35). The jealous person must constantly maintain proportionality. This mandates a nasty form of self-centeredness, wherein the jealous person is capable neither of believing the beloved absolutely nor of giving himself wholly to anyone or anything. This may be the purest example of the folly of “an eye for an eye”—such a law may be considered just to some, but few would say that this behavior is loving.2

Just as with hatred, we see that love which has undergone eternity’s change is more powerful than jealous love. This fire of jealousy may appear to have more powers than simple love; the former watches its object with a hundred eyes, unblinkingly panopticon-like, whereas the loving one only sees love wherever she looks. Jealousy loves only by way of comparison, but this “simple love” cannot imagine “spontaneously loving according to preference—it loves.” (p. 36)

As we have seen, spontaneous love can be transformed within itself and become two sickly forms of itself—hatred and jealousy. While these are clearly malformations, misshapen forms of love, they are nonetheless signs of love’s existence. After all, the jealous person would not be jealous if he did not love his beloved, if he held indifference toward the beloved. That is what it means for hatred and jealousy to be love changed within itself, I think: they are both essentially the same as the love which preceded them and grounds them. Love has “gone underground” in hatred and jealousy, but it remains present, if invisible.

There is a second way in which love can be changed which is far worse. Namely, love may be changed from itself:

Spontaneous love can be changed from itself, it can be changed over the years, as is frequently enough seen. Then love loses its ardor, its joy, its desire, its originality, its freshness. Just as the river that sprang out of the rocks is dissipated further down in the sluggishness of the dead waters, so also love is dissipated in the lukewarmness of habit. [...] spontaneous love can be changed from itself and become unrecognizable, since hate and jealousy are still recognized as signs of love. Sometimes a person becomes aware, as when a dream flashes by and is forgotten, that habit has changed him; he wants to make amends but does not know where he should go and buy new oil to rekindle his love. Then he becomes despondent, annoyed, weary of himself, weary of his love, weary of its being as paltry as it is, weary of not being able to get it changed, because unfortunately he has not in good time paid attention to eternity’s change and now has even lost the capacity to endure the cure. (p. 36)

These are the sorts of details that I am only catching on my third read-through. Notice what Kierkegaard says is lost that love must not lose: ardor, joy, desire, originality, freshness. I would, if quizzed, tend to connect ardor and joy and desire with the idea of “preferential love;” yet Kierkegaard seems to say here that these are integral parts of the divinely commanded love. Love is lost entirely when someone allows his love to fall into disrepair; he becomes habituated to the beloved or the friend. In the eyes of one lost to habit, the friend’s failings and foibles begin to cover his beauty, and the one who formerly loves no longer sees the wonder that is another person, another Imago Dei.

If, however, love has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty, it does not know habit and habit can never gain power over it. Just as eternal life is said to have no sighing and no tears, so one could add: and no habit either, and truly by this we do not say anything less glorious. If you want to save your soul or your love from habit’s cunning—yes, people believe there are many ways to keep oneself awake and secure, but there really is only one: eternity’s shall. Let the thunder of a hundred cannons remind you three times a day to resist the force of habit. [...] Have a friend who reminds you every time he sees you. Have a wife who, in love, reminds you early and late—but take care that this does not also become a habit! [...] Only the eternal, and therefore that which has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty, is the unchanging—but the unchanging that specifically cannot become habit. (p. 37)

Writing up this section is helping me begin to solidify something that has been percolating for awhile. There are many, many scholars who believe that Kierkegaard’s view of love is essentially an either/or—either you can have friends, a spouse, the loves of preferences, or you can follow Christian, neighbor love. This error began in earnest with Theodor Adorno’s 1939 article “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” and has propagated somewhat uncritically ever since. Under this lens, Kierkegaard’s picture of love is myopic, tepid, and joyless; there is no room for enjoyment or pleasure, all one can do is silently follow duty into battle.

I believe this is nonsense. Adorno is, somewhat famously, the ur-misreader of Kierkegaard. He made the one mistake which Kierkegaard most implored people not do: namely, to impute all of the books, pseudonymous and signed, to the same author.3 It seems to me that many people have followed in Adorno’s footsteps—either by not reading Works of Love closely, or not reading it at all! How can we say that Kierkegaard has no room for joy nor desire nor originality in love, when he so clearly tells us the contrary? Not only does he believe that there is a place for those things within love, but the clearest sign that love has been changed from itself, into non-love, is the lack of these very things.

I think defending those five qualities—ardor, joy, desire, originality, freshness—is what SK means when he says that unchanging love “cannot become habit.” I do wonder if there is a mild language difference between English and the Danish: at least in English, I could reasonably say “it is my habit to practice the piano once a week” and not thereby declare that I practice without ardor, joy, etc. But it does say that I would practice piano, regardless of whether I have the ardor, joy, etc., for the piano or not on that day. At least in this context, SK says that habit removes these things.

One final note: it is particularly interesting to me that Kierkegaard included desire in the list of five, and that he specifically recommends your wife or your friend remind you of your duty to love. Frankly, when going through the first few sections of this series, I found myself wondering exactly what “spontaneous love” or “preferential love” denoted. The simplest object to attack seemed to be desire, or something analogous to it. But given what he says in the pages we have covered today, I no longer think this is the case. It seems more plausible to me that when SK attacks preferential love, he is attacking preference as a movement of the will, as a decision or an attitude towards another person—not feelings of desire for a person, or appreciation of their beauty, etc. There is plenty of book left to go, of course, and I look forward to updating this model as we progress, but for now, I think Adorno and his followers are plainly incorrect.

As usual for this series, we will pick up next time where we left off, which is:

Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally made free in blessed independence. (p. 37)

If you have any thoughts, I would enjoy reading them down below in the comments. I am particularly interested in what you guys think about my reading of Kierkegaard defending ardor, joy, and desire—am I onto something, or entirely off base? And, as always, thanks for reading.

Matthew 22:39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Today we continue our read-along of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. As this will be the final post of the year, now is a good time to note that I will be turning on paid subscriptions on January 1st (that is, tomorrow). None of my work will be paywalled, but if you find what I am doing valuable, any monetary support is much appreciated. If you haven’t read them yet and want to catch up, here are links to the primer article and the most recent articles:

Oath-taking and Uncertainty

We begin where we left off last time:

“You shall love.” Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair. (p. 29, bold original)

As I mentioned, we are breaking up the remainder of the section into smaller pieces. This is in part because the chapter itself is structured this way, and in part because otherwise I would not finish writing about this chapter until March of 2039.1 Kierkegaard will slowly walk us through each of these components from the above quote, and we’ll follow suit. Our section today will focus on the following:

Kierkegaard continues immediately on:

However joyous, however happy, however indescribably confident instinctive and inclinational love, spontaneous love, can be itself, precisely in its most beautiful moment it still feels a need to bind itself, if possible, even more securely. Therefore the two swear an oath, swear fidelity or friendship to each other. When we speak most solemnly, we do not say of the two, “They love each other”; we say, “They swore fidelity to each other” or “They swore friendship to each other.” (p. 29)

This is an insight that is brilliant precisely in its obviousness. In our moments of inclinational love, we seek to secure that love, to make it even more certain than it is. This is entirely natural, of course: what would be more disturbing than to discover that one’s ardent love for another is not reciprocated? Precisely because we love this other person so much, we do not wish to lose them; we only become certain we will not lose them by swearing fidelity or friendship to them.2 We wish always to know that we stand upon solid ground, that we are not placing our love on top of something which will falter. How does our preferential love go about seeking certainty? Not simply by loving the other person, but by swearing an oath to the other, or asking the other to swear an oath.

Does this love then swear by something that is higher than itself? No, that it does not do. This is the beautiful, the touching, the enigmatic, the poetic misunderstanding—that the two do not themselves discover this; [...] When this love swears, it actually gives itself the significance by which it swears; it is the love itself that gives the luster to that by which it swears. Therefore it not only does not swear by something higher but actually swears by something that is lower than itself. This love in indescribably rich in its lovable misunderstanding: just because it is itself an infinite richness, an unlimited trustworthiness, when it wants to swear it will swear by something lower—but does not discover this itself. The result, in turn, is that this swearing, which indeed should be and also honestly thinks itself to be the highest earnestness, is actually the most enchanting jest. [...] Yet it is surely easy to understand that if one is truly to swear, one must swear by something higher; then God in heaven is the only one who is truly in the position of being able to swear by himself alone. (p. 29-30)

There’s a lot here. I had to go review why exactly it is “surely easy to understand” that one must swear by something higher. We don’t really use oath-taking as a rhetorical or personal device anymore. I’ve never had someone make a promise to me beginning with “I swear by God above” or “I swear with the Law as my witness,” anyway. The last sentence is Kierkegaard just being a bible nerd:

No innovation yet. As I understand it, we only swear by something “greater than ourselves” precisely because we want to invoke something with more power than ourselves as guarantor. If I say “I promise X,” that’s great and all, but I’m only human. Humans fail at promises all the time! But if I go further and say “I promise X with God as my witness,” well now I’ve invoked divinity. I had best not fail now that I’ve invoked God as my guarantor, right?

With that principle in mind, Kierkegaard points out something interesting. Inclinational love, preferential love, even in its most beautiful moment will seek certainty. And it does not seek certainty in something higher than itself—no, it seeks certainty by swearing an oath on something lower than itself. The “poetic misunderstanding” is that the two do not discover this—that they are trying to make their love more certain on a foundation less powerful than love is! Because the lovers, the friends seek to place their love on top of something less stable, their swearing, which “indeed should be the highest earnestness, is actually the most enchanting jest.”

Another thing which sticks out to me is that SK calls even this preferential love an “infinite richness”. That, alongside his insistence that

When this love swears, it actually gives itself the significance by which it swears; it is the love itself that gives the luster to that by which it swears.

shows us that this love, although it is not yet truly Christian love, is nonetheless love. It is on the right path, so to speak. If it were not, then it would not be a participation in the highest, that than by which nothing else can be higher—except God. If it were not the highest, then there would be other worldly things that are higher than it, by which it could swear.

As we saw last time (and throughout this whole chapter), Kierkegaard wants us to experience the tension between our objects of preference—the friend, the beloved—and the command that we shall love the neighbor. I think even here, though, we get a brief reminder that SK does not want us to be friendless or marriage-less—he wants us to remember the force of the command you shall love.

In such a way this love swears, and then the two add to the oath that they will love each other “forever.” [...] And the poet is right in this, that if two people will not love each other eternally, then their love is not worth talking about, even less worth singing praises about. The poet, however, does not detect the misunderstanding that the two swear by their love to love each other, instead of swearing love to each other by eternity. Eternity is the higher. If one is to swear, then one must swear by the higher; but if one is to swear by eternity, then one swears by the duty that one “shall love.” (p. 30-31, italics original)

When love swears by something lower than itself, it “gives the luster to that by which it swears.” SK says that what this really means is that love is swearing by itself. This love says “I swear on this object, which only appears wonderful because it is involved in me, preferential love.” But we saw before that this is a misunderstanding; one must swear by something higher.

[This two page section makes me aware of how little of Kierkegaard’s corpus I’ve really read—because I do not understand why his focus is on “the poet”. I suspect I need to read Either/Or for this,3 which I will do soon but not soon enough to figure it out for this article. If any of my fellow Kierkegaard-lovers have any thoughts or explanation I would be much obliged. I would harbor a guess that the poet is emblematic of the aesthetic sphere of life? But I have no idea beyond that.]

Now we come to the crux of the matter. If love is to swear by something higher—which it must do, in order to swear, in order to find security—then there is only one option. Eternity. But the eternal law is that you shall love; thus the only true oath that love can make is that it shall love. We reflected on it last time, but I think it’s good here to sit again with this command for a moment and reflect on how radical it is. Perhaps better people than I have the thought that you must love the idiot driver in front of you, or the annoying classmate behind you, or the crush who ghosted you, etc.; this is not a thought I find naturally occurring in myself. Yet the rule is that always, in every circumstance and situation, I shall love my neighbor. It is my duty. Insanity! How different the world would be, if we followed this even 10% of the time.

What follows is the center of our section today, and I think it is one of the more important passages in the entire book. Because of this, I present it in one piece:

Therefore this spontaneous love has, in the sense of the beautiful imagination, the eternal in itself, but it is not consciously grounded upon the eternal and thus it can be changed. [...] That which merely exists, which has undergone no change, continually has change outside itself; it can continually supervene, even in the last moment it can happen, and not until life has come to an end can we say: Change did not take place—or perhaps it did.

Whatever has undergone no change certainly has existence, but it does not have enduring continuance; insofar as it has existence, it is; but insofar as it has not gained enduring continuance amid change it cannot become contemporary with itself(48) and in that case is either happily ignorant of this misrelation or is disposed to sadness. Only the eternal can be and become and remain contemporary with every age; in contrast, temporality divides within itself, and the present cannot become contemporary with the future, or the future with the past, or the past with the present. (p. 31-32, italics/bold original)

Because this passage is so key, we’ll go through it slowly and in order. As we mentioned just before, Kierkegaard does believe that this spontaneous love is still love: we see that again when he says it has “the eternal” in itself. What SK wants to make us aware of is that although it is love and therefore a participation in God (who is the eternal), “it is not consciously grounded upon the eternal and thus it can be changed.” This change—really, the possibility of change—is an issue, if we are to say spontaneous love is true, Christian love. As we saw in the preceding articles, Christian love requires that we love as a duty—but if spontaneous love can be changed into not-love then it is not Christian love at all. Even spontaneous love which manages to avoid change always has the possibility of changing—think the spurned jealousy of a crush, or long years of habit cooling a marriage. This sort of love cannot be said to endure “until life has come to an end”. Only when love is a duty is love eternally secured.

Certainly we can say that this spontaneous love has existence, but it does not, as SK says, have “enduring continuance”. He says this is problematic, because without enduring continuance, spontaneous love “cannot become contemporary with itself”. At first I did not understand what being contemporary with itself entailed. Once again, the Hongs saved me an immense amount of trouble with footnote 48, which points to the following Journals and Papers4 excerpt from 1847, the same year in which Works of Love was published:

Everyone desires to be or to become contemporary with great men, great events, etc.—but only God knows how many people really live contemporaneously with themselves. To be contemporary with oneself (therefore neither in the future of fear nor of expectation nor in the past) is transparency in repose, and this is possible only in the God-relationship, or it is the God-relationship. —JP I 1050 (Pap. VIII(1) A 320) n.d., 1847.

In other words, only love which is grounded in eternity, in the command that we shall love, can exist “neither in the future of fear nor of expectation nor in the past”. This acceptance of the present as the present without worrying about what the future holds, nor what the past already is, requires placing everything on eternity’s “shall”. Without this shall, we lie in one of two states. Either I remain dangerously ignorant of the precariousness of my situation—the possibility that at any moment, my love may be alchemically transmuted into not-love; or I will be disposed to sadness. This sadness springs from the awareness of the possibility of change, yet without making love into a duty, which would secure my love against every change.

Of that which has gained enduring continuance by undergoing change, we can say, when it has existed, not only “It did exist,” but we can say, “It has gained enduring continuance while it existed.” This is the safeguard and is a relation entirely different from that of good fortune. When love has undergone the change of eternity by having become a duty, it has gained enduring continuance, and it is self-evident that it exists. (p. 32)

To secure love against every change (which, spoiler, will be the focus of the next article), we must change love from being spontaneous, inclinational, into the duty that I shall love. A friendship or a spouse is, as SK says, good fortune—to him, there is no guarantee that we shall be blessed with one in life. But the duty that one shall love the friend, shall love the beloved? That is the same duty that we are faced with in every human relationship, for we shall love the neighbor. Once love has undergone this change, we shall see that it is eternally secured—against every other change. The next paragraph is an extended analogy which, although long, is key for understanding the rest of the material we will cover. If you are finding his prose here too florid for easy comprehension, try reading it out loud; SK recommends this himself several times throughout his corpus.

No one would think of saying that sterling silver [Prøve-Sølv] must stand the test [Prøve] of time, since it is, after all, sterling silver. So it is also with love. The love that simply has existence, however happy, however blissful, however confident, however poetic it is, still must stand the test of the years. But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty has gained enduring continuance—it is sterling silver. Is it therefore perhaps less applicable, less useful in life? Is, then, sterling silver less useful? Indeed not, but language, involuntarily, and thought, consciously, honor sterling silver in a distinctive way merely by saying “One uses it.” There is no talk at all about testing, one does not insult by wanting to test it—after all, one knows in advance that sterling silver endures. Therefore, when one uses a less reliable alloy, one is compelled to be more scrupulous and to speak less simply; one is compelled almost ambiguously to say it in two ways, “One uses it, and while one uses it one is also testing it,” because it is, of course, always possible that it could change. (p. 32)

I like this image—love is sterling silver, in the Danish literally tested-silver or test-silver. One would not insult tested-silver by testing it, would we? In the same way, there is spontaneous love, which must still “stand the test of the years” to make sure it does not change. There is also love grounded in the eternal, love as a duty. He is mostly summarizing here what we’ve already seen, so we continue on:

Consequently, only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured. This security of eternity casts out all anxiety and makes love perfect, perfectly secured. In that love which has only existence, however confident it is, there is still an anxiety, an anxiety about the possibility of change. Such love does not understand that this is anxiety any more than the poet does, because the anxiety is hidden, and the only expression is the flaming craving, whereby it is known that the anxiety is hidden underneath. Otherwise why is it that spontaneous love is so inclined to, indeed, so infatuated with, making a test of the love? This is simply because love has not, by becoming duty, undergone the test in the deepest sense. (p. 32-33, italics original)

As I discussed in Chapter I, I have felt this anxiety about love more than once. Indeed, the question “why do you love me?” is a test of the love—it is an attempt to discern whether the love is “real” or not. Kierkegaard’s claims are corroborated in my own internal life: my anxiety about others’ love for me is precisely out of worry that they will stop loving me at some later time. I think this is the other side of the impulse to swear an oath:—to swear an oath, in particular, by something lower than love. Just as I want to test the love, I know that the other wants to test my love: I offer them an oath in exchange. This testing and oath-giving, in the language of the analogy, shows that inclinational love only has existence, not enduring continuance. “Testing is always related to possibility; it is always possible that what is being tested would not stand the test” (p. 33).

It is an indictment of American5 Christianity that the only time I commonly see people recognizing their duty to love another person day-to-day is in marriage and family life. The early church was far better about this, of course—a common criticism from the Romans was something along the lines of “Why do you people care about each other so much? It’s not like you guys are family, you have no duty to one another.” I have written about the early church and her radical nature in more detail here and here. But we do not do this. We take no oaths to love a friend, or a church brother, or a mentor—hell, we don’t recognize that there is a duty to love at all. And I’m honestly not sure what can be done to change that.6 This duty to love the neighbor seems closer to universally ignored than acknowledged.

This testing, probing anxiety can only be solved by recognizing my duty. Not, indeed, by the other person swearing to me that they shall love, that their duty is to love. That can itself become a test! “Please swear it again,” I hear myself say, “swear again that it is your duty to love.” No, only love has eyes with which to see love, as we saw in Chapter I. It is through recognizing my own duty to love in the face of whatever happens—whether the other continues to love me or not—that I can be released from my anxiety. This is not easy, of course. I should rather think it is the hardest thing in the universe, to follow this command: but it is right. Maybe the other will love me, maybe he will not; I shall love him regardless, for it is my duty. “But when it is a duty to love, then no test is needed and no insulting foolhardiness of wanting to test, then love is higher than any test; it has already more than stood the test in the same sense as faith ‘more than conquers.’” (p. 33)

Never has any greater security been found, and never will the peace of eternity be found in anything other than in this shall. The idea of “testing,” however congenial it is, is an unquiet thought, and it is the disquietude that will make one fancy that this is a higher assurance, because testing is in itself inventive and will not be exhausted any more than sagacity has ever been able to calculate all the contingencies, but on the other hand, as the earnest person puts it so well, “Faith has calculated all contingencies.” When one shall, it is eternally decided; and when you will understand that you shall love, your love is eternally secured. (p. 34)

Just as we can always exhaust more energy trying to determine whether another person is the neighbor, so also we can always find more ways to test love. Both are the same misrelation to love. The task is not to find the neighbor but become the neighbor; the task is not to find love but to be loving. If love wants to be eternally secured (and who amongst us does not want to know our love eternally secure?) then we must recognize that to love is a duty. Only when love is a duty, only then is love eternally secured.

This concludes our reflections on the eternal security to be found in the duty to love. We will pick up next time on the following topic, which begins:

When one shall, it is eternally decided; and when you will understand that you shall love, your love is eternally secured.

By this shall love is also eternally secured against every change. The love that has only existence can be changed; it can be changed within itself and it can be changed from itself. (p. 34)

As usual, if you have any thoughts please leave a comment down below, I would love to hear them. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, I would be immensely grateful if you liked/restacked/shouted this post from the mountaintops/etc—this series takes a lot of my time and energy. I will continue doing it regardless of the numbers these articles get, of course, but it is motivating to learn that other people appreciate the work I put into them. Thanks for reading.

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Brief Biographical Portrait

Charles-Valentin Alkan was born in Paris in 1813, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents. His father, himself a musician and teacher, recognized Alkan’s prodigy early on: by the age of seven the younger Alkan was winning prizes at the Conservatoire de Paris. He began performing on the Paris salon circuit, where his immense technical prowess quickly brought him fame. This newfound popularity brought connections to others active in the Parisian arts scene, including Liszt, Victor Hugo, and Chopin. The height of his fame came in his mid-20s, where he became close friends with Chopin after consistent performances with Chopin and Liszt.

Alkan would retreat for six years between 1838 and 1844, preferring to focus on private study and composition. Although he returned to performing again in 1844, this was short-lived; the combination of the Conservatoire offering the director of piano position to a rival of Alkan’s, combined with Chopin’s death in 1849, pushed him into a reclusion that would last more than two decades. This aversion to the public is why we only have two known photos of him, one of which you have just seen above, the other just below. It is also much of why Alkan is so little-known today—he did almost nothing to promote his own work. The fame of Liszt and Chopin, both similar stylistically but much more famous than Alkan, also hindered his ability to gain purchase with the public.

We do not know much about his activities during this time, other than that he continued to write music, and completed a translation of the Old and New Testaments from the originals into French. In an 1865 letter to a friend, Alkan said of this task, “Having translated a good deal of the Apocrypha, I’m now onto the second Gospel which I am translating from the Syriac [...] In starting to translate the New Testament, I was suddenly struck by a singular idea – that you have to be Jewish to be able to do it.” Alkan was fluent in Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac; unfortunately his translation is lost to time. Many of his mature works were written during this period.

He returned to public life somewhat beginning in 1873, giving an annual concert series as long as his health permitted him. He died in 1888 at the age of 74. There is a myth that he died from a bookcase falling on him as he reached for a copy of the Talmud placed high on a shelf, but this appears to be an urban legend.

Esquisses, Op. 63

Those who do know Alkan will likely know him for his extremely technical writing for the piano, which we will discuss in due time. I do not think that is the correct place to begin with Alkan, however, and would instead recommend the 49 Esquisses, Op. 63. These miniatures are highly varied, hitting every major and minor key twice, with an extra picture-window into C Major at the end. With so many pieces, and such varying moods and styles, it is likely that you will not enjoy all of them. (I certainly prefer some to others.) Some of those I particularly enjoy are numbers 1, 4, 15, 24, 32, 34-39,1 and 49. The last of those, entitled Laus Deo, sounds straight out of Ravel or Debussy, although it precedes both by nearly a century. But I recommend listening to the whole thing yourself, as in all likelihood your tastes will vary from mine!

Grande Sonate ‘Les Quatre Ages’, Op. 33

This sonata is the only true sonata that Alkan composed—his Sonatine Op. 61 is a compressed version of traditional sonata form. It is called “the four ages” because each movement is entitled a particular age: in order, 20, 30, 40, 50. The first is frantic, almost klutzy; the second has the additional title of Quasi-Faust; the last is extrêmement lent, extremely slow, and titled Prometheus Bound. The score for the final movement also begins with a quotation from Aeschylus’s play of the same name. Alkan himself wrote a preface to the score in an attempt to justify this “ambitious” titling of the movements, which I quote in full (translated from the French):

Much has been said and written about the limits of musical expression. Without adopting such and such a rule, without seeking to answer any of the vast questions raised by this or that system, I shall simply say why I have given such titles to these four parts, and sometimes use quite unusual terms.

It is not a question here of imitative music, still less music seeking its own justification, the reason for its effect, its value, in an extra musical environment. The first piece is a scherzo, the second an allegro, the third and the fourth an andante and a largo, but each of them corresponds, in my case, to a particular moment of existence, to a particular disposition of the imagination. Why should I not point it out? The musical element will always subsist, and the expression can only gain by it, executing it, without renouncing it, it is inspired by the very idea of the composer. Such a name and a thing seem to clash, taken in a material sense, which, in the intellectual domain, combine perfectly. I believe, then, that I ought to be better understood and better interpreted with these indications, however ambitious they appear at first glance.

Let me, moreover, be permitted to invoke Beethoven’s authority. It is well known that towards the end of his career this great man was working on a catalog of his principal works, in which he was to be instructed on what plan, what remembrance, what kind of inspiration the work had been conceived.

C.V. Alkan

There is much that could be said about this mountain of a sonata, but I will note two brief things. First, the second movement alone is one of the more incredible pieces to be written during the 19th century, both in terms of technical prowess and musicality. If you listen to no other Alkan today, I implore that you listen to Quasi-Faust. Those who consider Alkan as nothing more than a technical expert with little musicality have never listened to this movement.

At one point near the end of the movement, there is for eleven measures, depending on who you ask, a fugue with six, seven(!), eight(!!), nine(!!!) or eleven (!!!!) voices.

My hands wither just by looking at it. As you might expect, there are very few pianists alive who can perform this, and that means the recording I recommend today is Marc-Andre Hamelin’s.2

12 Etudes in All the Minor Keys, Op. 39

This is the big one. If you have pianist friends who’ve heard of Alkan, this is likely the music they think of. These Etudes are fiendishly difficult, and that is their main reputation. Even the Transcendental etudes of Liszt cannot measure up to some of the moments in this set. It opens with the rip-roaring, tachycardic Comme le vent (Like the wind) in A minor:

Yes, you read that right. First off, it’s in 2/16, already an unusual time signature. The hard part isn’t that—no, it instead lies in the tempo marking being eighth note = 160. Much of the piece contains sustained runs of triplet 32nd notes, which means the pianist is expected to play at sixteen notes per second in the right hand. A later section even includes 64th notes, which comes out to over twenty-one notes per second. This piece attempts to blow away the pianist and the audience alike. And that’s just the first etude!

The second, En rythme molossique (In Molossian rhythm) in D minor, immediately slaps you upside the head with pounding octave chords. It is a piece of incredible rhythmic vitality, as the opening rhythm drives the development of the whole piece. Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, an English composer of the 20th century, believed this to be one of the “most original” of all the etudes, saying of it that “the dour, harsh, heavy brutality of the rhythm is magnificently expressed.”3

Etudes 4-7 constitute Alkan’s Symphony for Solo Piano.4 It is a genuine symphony—Alkan is attempting, as best he can, to broadly mimic the timbres and harmonic textures available to a full orchestra with only the piano. The fourth etude (the first movement of the symphony) is possibly my own favorite from this set, and one that I think shows off Alkan’s musical abilities most wonderfully. It is technically demanding, of course—Alkan has a reputation to uphold, after all—but the climax at the end of the movements sends genuine chills down my spine. The fifth and sixth etudes are marginally easier on the hands, but the finale of the symphony is a ride in hell.

Blisteringly fast octaves in the left hand—marked to be played piano, quietly, by the way—punctuate a hectic melody sometimes dark, sometimes cheery. Alkan’s obsession with harmonic movement comes out in this movement especially; over the course of about five minutes your tonal center will shift times innumerable.

Sorabji was also a big fan of the symphony:

The feeling and treatment is thoroughly symphonic, yet superbly adapted to the exigencies of the instrument. Here, again, kinship with Berlioz peeps out repeatedly, especially in the F major section of the second movement, ‘The March Funèbre’. The finale has a very Beethoven-like quality, but is in no imaginable sense imitative—it is merely an instance, such as occurs so often in all art, of two great and quite independent minds lighting on the same or a similar train of thought.5

Etudes 8-10 constitute Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano. Like the symphony, the concerto is written with conscious imitation of a normal concerto for piano and orchestra, including sections marked Tutti and Solo. This concerto is not for the faint of heart. The first movement alone contains more measures than the entire Hammerklavier sonata of Beethoven; a full performance of the concerto is nearly an hour and over 120 pages of music. Anyone daring to attempt this piece better have every technique in the book (and most of the ones not in the book) down pat, because:

Yeah. And those are just from the first movement!

Now, I emphasize the difficulty because it really is difficult. For my money, these three etudes alone would constitute the most difficult piece of piano music written before Sorabji and Busoni, much less the entire Op. 39 set taken as a whole. And for a long time, when I listened to these all I could hear was the technical prowess required. But if you set that aside and listen to purely as music, I think these etudes may surprise you. I changed my mind—the eighth etude is actually my favorite. Not because of the techniques required, but because it is genuinely damn good music.

Sorabji, a much better writer than I, sums up rather accurately my feelings on the concerto as a whole:

One has no hesitation in saying that this is one of the most remarkable and original piano concertos in existence, worthy of a place beside the Busoni and Reger works: its astonishing freshness, the absolute independence and individuality impressed on every bar, the splendid richness, variety and brilliance of the keyboard writing, the prodigious vitality and energy of the work make its neglect a matter of mystery—indeed, one suspects that not one pianist in a hundred even knows of its existence.6

And what a shame it is, that so few pianists know of it! Most of us could not fathom performing it, it is true, but recordings do exist now, and they are wonderful. Speaking of recordings—while there are several good ones now, I think the best introduction you could receive to the Op. 39 set is this recording, by Vincenzo Maltempo, where he performed all twelve etudes live. Supposedly this recording is one of only three times in the history of the work that the complete set was performed live in one concert; I have been unable to find a source for this claim, but it seems eminently plausible to me.

Regardless of the veracity of that particular claim, Maltempo is entirely justified in calling this concert a “monumental” achievement. Maltempo is an Alkan scholar himself and one of his fiercest defenders in our age, and I think I prefer his interpretations over most others.

Honorable mentions

Some two-sentence blurbs for other pieces worth listening to:

• Trois Morceaux, Op. 15. Somber, moody, and at times intensely pining, this set of three pieces are some of Alkan’s most tender writing. If you want something a bit (a *bit*) less technically demanding as a window into Alkan, I definitely recommend this.

• Sonatine, Op. 61. The only other sonata-esque piece Alkan wrote, this piece comes in at a compact 20 minutes, but it packs a punch. The first movement is highly energetic, the second is joyously playful, and the whole piece is worth a listen.

• 3 Concerti da camera, Op. 10. One of the few surviving orchestral works of Alkan’s. Given that this was written relatively early in Alkan’s career, it’s a bit more classical in idiom—if you find that some of the later pieces are harsh to the ear, try this one first.

Summary and Bonus Piece

Alkan’s music, as far as I can tell, is little-known because of three largely disparate facts:

1. As we saw, Alkan did almost nothing whatsoever to promote his own music during his life. Music is hard enough to gain fame in if you dedicate your whole life to gaining traction! His complete lack of publications and concerts for decades gave him no assistance.

2. The technical requirements to play much of his work is well and truly restrictive. I—an amateur—can hope one day to learn something like the first piece from Op. 15, but the Etudes? Entirely out of reach.7 That is the realm of the professionals.

3. Alkan is stylistically similar at times to Chopin and Liszt, both of whom are also known for writing difficult-yet-beautiful piano music, and both of whom were also famous virtuosos of their time.

These three factors combined to make Alkan a nearly-forgotten figure in music, especially for the first few decades after he died. Much like we saw last week with Medtner, there is a slow resurgence in appreciation for Alkan, and I hope one day that Alkan may return to his rightful place at the table of Romantic composers.

For a bonus piece, today I want to highlight Liszt’s B Minor Sonata. This is quite a well-known piece of his, but I believe it highlights everything that people love about his work. It also serves the additional purpose of tying back to our first article from two weeks ago; Medtner’s Night Wind sonata is in part an homage to the Liszt B minor. Both have “movements” only in the loosest of interpretations, both come in at around half an hour, and both are extremely technically demanding. I love Zimerman’s recording of this piece, linked below; it took him 76 attempts before he was finally satisfied.

As always, thanks for reading. If you have any composers you want to see highlighted, please let me know down in the comments.

Matthew 22:39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Today we continue our read-along of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. If you haven’t read them yet and want to catch up, here are links to the primer article and the most recent articles:

I apologize for the long gap in between articles—PhD applications have been a massive timesink. To somewhat remedy this issue, I believe I have found a way to break up the rest of chapter IIA into smaller pieces without sacrificing pedagogical unity. If nothing else, this will serve to lighten the work required for each individual piece.

As we saw last time, Kierkegaard views this as yourself as implying several things:

• All humans are presupposed to act with “self-love”. In particular, they act with a selfish form of self-love, that must be remedied by the command “love your neighbor as yourself.”

• The neighbor forms the category of “the Other”. This category is integral to selfhood itself—I am both self to myself, and Other to everyone else. It is only by recognizing both categories that we can become true Selves.

• Selfish self-love is a failure to recognize this duality inherent in selfhood. When I act selfishly, I extend myself through my own preferences, rather than incorporating the other’s preferences into my own life.

• In contrast, when we love properly, we “redouble” ourselves. We find our true nature through another person. This motion of stepping outside of my self—one could say, becoming Other to myself—is what makes Simone Weil say “To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.”

We also get a reasonably concise summary from the man himself:

In this way the neighbor comes as close to self-love as possible. If there are only two people, the other person is the neighbor; if there are millions, everyone of these is the neighbor, who in turn is closer than the friend and the beloved, inasmuch as they, as the objects of preference, more or less hold together with the self-love in one. (p. 21, italics original, bold mine.)

[Now is a good occasion to remind that reading these articles is no replacement for reading the text itself. I found it necessary to not only read what I had previously written summarizing the topic, but also to re-read the original text before I could start writing this. I really do encourage you to pick up a copy to read.]

With these things in mind, we now pick up where the previous article left off:

We will now speak about:

You shall love,

because this is the very mark of Christian love and is its distinctive characteristic—that it contains this apparent contradiction: to love is a duty. (p. 23-24, italics and bold original.)

This phrase, “you shall love,” is quite commonplace nowadays. It is a phrase, an idea we have all adjusted to after 20 centuries of exposure. Yet just as Kierkegaard notes for his own society, we do not connect this idea to other aspects of life very often. Would it ever occur to anyone watching The Bachelorette that we are commanded to love, that we ought to love? Would it occur to the viewer that it is the ethical obligation for every contestant to love not only the titular Bachelorette, but also his fellow contestants, no matter the outcome of this faux-contest? Would it occur to the viewer that the Bachelorette must love all of the contestants vying for her hand? I think not. Dating shows, dating Apps, and consumerist/individualist mindsets towards relationships all contribute to our disconnect between the idea “you shall love” and the way we often speak of love. SK continues:

Take a pagan who is not spoiled by having learned thoughtlessly to patter Christianity by rote or has not been spoiled by the delusion of being a Christian—and this commandment, “You shall love,” will not only surprise him but will disturb him, will be an offense to him. (p. 25)

As far as I can tell, “pagan” for Kierkegaard simply means “non-Christian.” Here, pagan ideas and beliefs are those which do not contain within themselves eternity’s truth, the truth of Christianity. Because of this, it’s important to note that he is not concerned with a historical reality but an existential reality, which he speaks of as follows:

And for the person who lives in our day, eighteen centuries later, is it less significant that he became a Christian because it is eighteen centuries since Christianity entered the world? And if it is not so very long since he became a Christian, he must certainly be able to remember what he was like before he became a Christian and consequently must know what change took place in him—if the change of becoming a Christian has taken place in him. Therefore world-historical expositions of paganism are not needed, as if it were eighteen centuries since the fall of paganism, for it is indeed not so very long since both you and I, my listener, were pagans—that is, if we have become Christians. (p. 26)

In this way, “pagan” and “paganism” seem to be SK’s equivalent terms for the Pauline concepts of “the flesh” and “the world”. We were all pagans, he says. Many of us may have grown up “spoiled by the delusion of being a Christian,” believing ourselves to be Christian while being pagans at heart. Indeed, for Kierkegaard the task always before us is to become Christians, a process which we do not finish in this life.1 This task is what SK is concerned with, and is why “world-historical expositions of paganism are not needed.” What does the task look like as it concerns our subject: love?

For this very reason that which is the mark of Christianity—”Everything has become new”—again fits the commandment of love. The commandment is not something new in an accidental sense, nor a novelty in the sense of something curious, nor something new in a temporal sense. Love had existed also in paganism, but this obligation to love is a change of eternity—and everything has become new. What a difference there is between the play of feelings, drives, inclinations, and passions, in short, that play of the powers of immediacy, that celebrated glory of poetry in smiles or in tears, in desire or in want—what a difference between this and the earnestness of eternity, the earnestness of the commandment in spirit and truth, in honesty and self-denial! (p. 25)

This is difficult for me and I expect for you as well—difficult not because the prose is hard, but because what he says pushes us. This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?2 If one were not careful to hold everything he says (and later will say) in our heads, we would be forgiven for believing that Kierkegaard views love as something necessarily without “feelings, drives, inclinations, and passions.” Yet he also told us not fifteen pages prior that “you should not [...] hold back your words any more than you should hide visible emotion if it is genuine, because this can be the unloving committing of a wrong, just like withholding from someone what you owe him” (p. 12). Not only can your lover, your friend, your child be an object of your love, but SK tells us that it is they who have a claim on the emotions we have for them. “You should let the mouth speak out of the abundance of the heart; you should not be ashamed of your feelings and even less of honestly giving each one his due” (p. 12). Why, then, does he present us with such a stark distinction between this supposedly “pagan” love, full of feelings and drives and desires, and Christian love, which exists in earnestness, honesty, and self-denial?

I see two reasons. First, he is prefiguring what he will tell us in a couple pages: the issue is not with having feelings, smiles, desires and tears, but with those experiences forming the foundation of love. Second, SK is ever-concerned not with the “essential” and “objective” matters, but with us, his readers, becoming loving people. Since he will address the first part in the next few pages, which we will see in the next article or two, I will defer that topic until then. The second part is worth unpacking .

As we briefly touched on in the first chapter, one of SK’s pseudonym’s famous maxims is that Subjectivity is Truth. The pseudonym Johannes Climacus is not a Christian, but nonetheless wants to bring the reader to the point where they understand—understand that ultimately, we must each choose. Each single individual must make choices, each must take ownership of his actions, each must decide what his life will be. Subjectivity is Truth. I must decide which truths I will be subject to, which truths will direct my life. This passion for the existential is why SK is often mistaken for a fideist or an irrationalist towards Christianity. Many have charged him with believing that faith is irrational, nonsensical, or even that Christianity is outright false. Similarly, I think here Kierkegaard is not reminding us of what he wrote not fifteen pages before because he wants us to wrestle existentially with these things.

Let us pretend for a moment that Kierkegaard had instead given us a clear analysis of what does and does not constitute love. In this case, it would be remarkable—remarkable in that it allows the reader to go on with his life unscathed by the truth! If we attempt to pin down what love is objectively, if we treat love purely as an object, then we have already begun the project improperly.3 Love is just as much a relation between subjects, a way of relating to myself, others, and the world, as it is an object to be studied objectively. But love is no mere object. If love is an existential posture we take towards the world—which is what we saw in Chapter 1—then treating love as an object to be studied is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If love is an ethical task which each of us must perform, then treating love as just another object of study is to dally long where we must not rest. We must set to our task straightaway, with all of our might; there is no time to waste.

The shadiness of a deceiver is not so dangerous—in fact, one becomes more readily aware of it; but this, to have the highest in a kind of indifferent fellowship, in the indolence of a habit, indeed, in the indolence of a habit that even wants to make the generation the recipient and the single individuals automatically sharers by virtue of that—this is a terrible thing. Of course, the highest is not to be booty, you are not to have it selfishly for yourself, since what you can have only for yourself alone is never the highest. But even if in the deepest sense you have the highest in common with all others (and this is precisely the highest, what you can have in common with everyone), you are, believing, nevertheless to have it for yourself in such a way that you keep it while everyone else perhaps also keeps it; but, in addition, even if everyone else gives it up. (p. 27)

Because he recognized this, SK wrote in such a way as to draw us, dear reader, into existential wrestling with the command. We must not be deceived out of the highest. He does not want us to simply know that we shall love, in the way that a five year old in Sunday School may “know” the command. He wants us instead to come into contact with this command existentially, to wrestle with it, to leave the text changed not simply in mind but in Spirit and in Truth. As he told us, “it is Christianity’s intention to wrest self-love away from us human beings” (p. 17). I should also say that it is Kierkegaard’s intention to wrest self-love away from us. He wants us to not simply understand academically, intellectually, what love is—no, we must not hold the highest in indifferent fellowship like that.

It is by not clarifying at this passage that Christianity’s love, in earnestness and honesty and self-denial, can co-exist also with feelings and smiles and “the powers of immediacy” that SK forces us to wrestle with this tension. The desire for clarity and its perceived lack is precisely the intended effect.

To my eye, this also seems to be more in alignment with how the Bible wants its readers to learn from it. Scripture is not reducible to a list of propositions, maxims, and sayings. This is not to say that the Bible is never clear—just as it is not to say that SK is never clear. Both can be (and often are) clear about particular things. But if the goal is to cause existential change within the reader, often the most effective tactic is to never state the desired answer at all. Bringing the listener to new conclusions is often best done by leading indirectly—we see this with Socrates and Jesus alike. We learn best not by being told the answer, but by discovering the answer ourselves.4

Is a password no secret because everyone knows it individually when it is confided to everyone and is kept as a secret by everyone? The secret of the password, however, is one thing today and another tomorrow, but it is the essence of faith to be a secret, to be for the single individual; if it is not kept as a secret by every single individual, even when he confesses it, then he does not believe. (p. 28)

Upon my first few read-throughs of this section, the choice of the word “secret” always mystified me. I do still wonder if this is a point of failure for translation, where the nuances become impossible to capture—I do not read Danish. But I also think I understand a bit more what he’s after. He calls faith a “secret” not because we are not supposed to speak of faith—he is speaking of it right now, after all—but because “secret” accurately captures how faith must be an interior state of our being. You must “have it for yourself in such a way that you keep it while everyone else perhaps also keeps it; but, in addition, even if everyone else gives it up.”

In other words, faith is not something that can be given to “the generation.” This is, of course, the great error of Christian Nationalism; it claims that faith can be given to a generation of people, to a nation.(footnote: this error is further compounded with the erroneous belief that faith can be spread with the tools of sword and state. Of course nothing could be further from the truth—and SK spent his dying years raising hell against the Danish church for becoming the state.) Faith is as far from that as possible—faith begins with the individual, with myself and my actions. We must each come to wrestle with these things as individuals. I am not a Christian simply because my family is a Christian family, or because I live in a Christian state or a Christian country. None of these facts are capable of making me a Christian. That task—and to become a Christian is indeed a strenuous task—falls solely at my feet.

Page 29 ends this aside on the nature of faith as interior, and we get the statement which will form the rest of our sections from this chapter:

“You shall love.” Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair. (p. 29, bold original)

As usual, I welcome any thoughts, provocations, comments, etc., in the comment section below—I am no expert, simply a fellow reader trying to understand one of the great thinkers of our age. Thanks for reading.

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Brief Biographical Portrait

Nikolai Medtner was born in 1880, to German-heritage parents in Moscow. A conservatory student by 1891, his skill at the piano was widely recognized, and when he graduated in 1900 he had already won the Rubinstein prize. Upon publication of his first piano sonata, Rachmaninov became a supporter of his work and a lifelong friend. It is Rachmaninov who towers over the figure of Medtner—both figuratively and literally, as Rachmaninov was 6’6”.

Unlike his friend Rachmaninov, Medtner did not leave Russia until well after the revolution; Rachmaninov assisted his friend by securing him a tour in the US and Canada, but Medtner never adjusted to the commercial realities of touring life. He and his wife eventually settled into a modest life in London, teaching, playing, and composing. Once World War II broke out, he stopped receiving payments from German publishing houses for his music. Financial hardship furthered his already-declining health, and he passed away after years of struggle in 1951.

6 Tales, Op. 51

Like Rachmaninov, Medtner was a pianist and composed primarily for solo piano. To no one’s surprise, I as a pianist have too many pieces to choose from, because I love so much of his work. But it would be remiss of me to start anywhere other than Medtner’s Tales, which are emblematic of his style. There are 38 Tales, or Skazki1 in total, but I am most partial to the Op. 51 set.2 A few years ago, I learned the second piece from this set, although never to the quality that you will hear from Geoffery Tozer in the recording linked here:

I quite enjoy Tozer’s recording, but for this piece I do not have an opinion on which constitutes the “best” recording. There are many recordings of the Tales online, and they each bring out different qualities in the music. And, although I haven’t been able to find any on YouTube, there are several recordings on Spotify of Medtner himself playing these.

While “Fairly Tales” may not be an accurate rending of Skazki linguistically, for Op. 51 the name is truly fitting. Each of them has a narrative quality—a little picture-window, a novella to another world. The varying harmonies, rhythms, and resonances unite to create portraits of characters only half-imagined, yet fully understood by his listeners. I am particularly partial to the first, second, and sixth Skazki from Op. 51, but the entire set (and all of the Tales) are worth your time. These little pictures are densely packed with beautiful, sonorous melodies atop bell-like harmony and allusions to Russian folklore. They are the perfect Medtnerian gateway drug, and will prepare you for more complex works like our next piece.

The Night Wind Sonata, Op. 25 No. 2

What are you wailing about, night wind, what are you bemoaning with such fury? What does your strange voice mean, now indistinct and plaintive, now loud? In a language intelligible to the heart you speak of torment past understanding, and you moan and at times stir up frenzied sounds in the heart!

Oh, do not sing those fearful songs about primeval native Chaos! How avidly the world of the soul at night listens to its favourite story! It strains to burst out of the mortal breast and longs to merge with the Infinite … Oh, do not wake the sleeping tempests; beneath them Chaos stirs!

—Fyodor Tyutchev, Of what do you howl, night wind...?

So reads the epigraph to our next piece. The shift from the Skazki to the sonatas is stark and somewhat jarring at times, and perhaps nowhere more so than with his 7th sonata, Night Wind. Where the Tales are short, digestible, and generally harmonically pleasing, Medtner’s sonatas prove to require much more attention from the ears. Of course, there are plenty of moments in the sonatas that will recall the generally optimistic outlook of the Tales—but the sonatas are the full unleashing of Medtner’s powers of musical development and complexity. Unlike the Tales, for this piece I do have an opinion about which recording I prefer, and it is Severin von Eckardstein’s:

For my money, Eckardstein’s recording is the only one to truly capture Medtner’s note beneath the title: “The whole piece is in an epic spirit (Вся пьеса в эпическом духе).” The Wind imposes its will upon you; relentless, undying, a force of nature stronger than human endeavor. Indeed, when I listened to it for the first time I could not really get my ears around the piece; the complexity baffled me in its unfamiliarity. But I listened to it again, while on a late-night walk amidst a chilly January wind. This piece captures a force of nature. “What does your strange voice mean, now indistinct and plaintive, now loud?” I could do a musicological analysis, a theoretical de-construction of how it accomplishes that, but frankly I think it is better to let this piece wash over you as the Wind does. If you can, put on some headphones on a cold, blizzard night and take a walk while listening to this masterpiece—once it clicks for you, you will, for the first time, experience the Night Wind.

Violin Sonata No. 3, Epica

This one is by far the most unusual with respect to what I normally listen to. Somehow, chamber music like this has never entered my mainstream music habit—I always have on solo works or orchestral works.3 In this case, though, the Medtnerian spirit captured something in this that I fell in love with immediately. Because I want to focus on a few particular moments as illustrations, I will refer to this recording for all of the timestamps that follow:

As one might expect from a sonata titled Epica, this piece is rather grand in scale, at 40+ minutes long. Medtner shows off all of his techniques in this piece. Consider, if you will, the passage beginning at 8:08. This would fit right into the developed impressionism of Ravel; in fact, if you took away the violin you could probably convince me that it’s an excerpt from La Valleé des Cloches, “The Valley of Bells”. The harmonies enter an ambiguous, somber land, full of seconds and fourths while entirely lacking a tonal center. It is a passage without origin, without center. Contrast this with the passage beginning at 34:54, which is nearly Baroque in its polyphonic rigidity. For a few seconds, it nearly sounds like a Bach partita, not a 20th century Russian romantic. This of course comes alongside the standard Medtnerian harmonies and rhythmic vitality, and it all creates a piece that I find enrapturing.

As with Night Wind, I think this pieces rewards re-listening, although it is not nearly so difficult to comprehend as Night Wind is. And, as with Night Wind, I think it is best to leave it largely unexplained, to be understood by the listener as you listen.

Honorable mentions

First: I really wanted to fit one of the piano concertos(music purists will yell at me for not saying “concerti” here, but I think concertos is fine and helps to remove the unhelpful perception of classical music as being only for stuck-up rich old people.) in the main body of the article, but could not. All three are great; I am loathe to choose only one. But if forced to choose, today I choose the 2nd:

Dedicated to Rachmaninov (who in turn dedicated his 4th piano concerto to Medtner), this piece comes to us in three movements: a Toccata, a Romanza, and a Divertimento. The orchestration is surprisingly well-done for a composer who spent so little time working with symphonic style, and there are several moments throughout that are simply divine.

Second: The 14 Sonatas are all excellent, and each could have their own articles written about them (although I am not anywhere near knowledgable enough to do this). Of them, I currently love the 11th sonata, Tragica, Op. 39 No. 5, and the 5th sonata, in G minor. Note that the video of Tragica that I’ve linked here is three separate recordings; two by Tozer, one of Sudbin. In the description of the G Minor sonata video is some wonderful analysis to give you an idea of the complexity of Medtner’s compositions, if that is of interest to you.

Summary (and Bonus Piece)

For a composer who Rachmaninov once called the “greatest composer of our time,” Medtner is criminally unknown and underrated. Thankfully, his mastery of the Russian Romantic style is slowly being recognized, and I hope that one day soon he will begin to be played in concert halls around the world once again.

For a bonus piece, I offer you something of Rachmaninov’s that is, unlike most of his works, little-known. Most people know Rachmaninov for his piano compositions, whether solo or with accompaniment—certainly not for his choral works.

I was torn between this piece, the All-Night Vigil, Op. 37, and his arrangement of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 31. Rachmaninov considered the Vigil one of his favorite works, and requested the fifth movement (Нынѣ отпущаеши, or in Latin the Nunc Dimittis) be performed at his funeral. While most of the piece is based on the traditional Russian liturgical chant,4 Rachmaninov makes considerable use of harmony and texture—at one point in the 7th movement, the choir is split into eleven parts. The fifth movement is notorious for requiring the basses to descend to a B-flat below the staff. Recalling the preparations for the premiere, Rachmaninov noted:

Danilin (the composer for the premiere) shook his head, saying, “Now where on earth are we to find such basses? They are as rare as asparagus at Christmas!” Nevertheless, he did find them. I knew the voices of my countrymen...

One comment on recording: although I have linked to a particular recording above, it is not the recording I would recommend. Only one recording of the Vigil measures up to the task—that being the 1965 recording with the State Academic Russian Chior of the USSR. It is to date the only recording I have found which has strong enough basses for the harmonies to fully emerge:

For whatever reason, the album is not available as a single track on YouTube; every movement has a separate “video”. I highly, highly recommend finding a copy on whatever your preferred streaming platform is and listening with good headphones. I swear they put something in the water over there, because basses (really, oktavists, so called because their range is an octave below the normal bass range) like those in this choir simply do not exist in America. Of Rachmaninov’s works, this may be one of his best, and it is certainly one of his most underrated.

As usual, if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment down below. I’d love to know which piece most struck your fancy, and if you have any composers you want to have put in the spotlight, let me know! I have two more in mind already, but I am more than open to suggestions. Thanks for reading.

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In preparation for a talk I am giving this semester, I’ve been reading through Pavel Florensky’s1 The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.2 This book comes with the recommendation of both and —if you aren’t familiar already you should check both of them out. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth has been an incredible read so far. One day I shall write much more about it. Today, we see it only in dialogue with our friend Kierkegaard. I also feel obligated to remind you, dear reader, that I am as far from an expert on Florensky as one could possibly be. These are the thoughts of an uneducated layman in this realm—take them with copious quantities of sodium.

In our read-along series, part one of Chapter IIA was quite difficult. I struggled to understand the concepts. I strained to explain them in a more-than-didactically-useless manner. Several readers joined me in this struggle for understanding. Imagine my annoyance when I came across a few lines in Florensky that sums up the whole idea:

Sin lies in the disinclination to leave the state of self-identity, the identity “I = I,” or more precisely, “I!” The root sin or the root of all sin is the assertion of oneself as oneself, without relation to that which is other, i.e., to God and to all creation. It is self-immersion without self-transcendence. All particular sins are only variants or manifestations of the stubborn self-immersion of selfhood. In other words, sin is the power of the protection of oneself as oneself that makes the person a “self-idol.” It is the power that “explains” I through I, not through God, and grounds I in I, not in God. (Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, p. 132. Bold my own.)

It is self-immersion without self-transcendence.3 Even if the rest of this article is useless, I am obligated to share that quote, as it made several things click into place for me. It seems to me that this self-immersion which Florensky decries is precisely the same impulse that Kierkegaard decries in Chapter IIA:

The neighbor, then, is nearer to you than anyone else. But is he also nearer to you than you are to yourself? No, that he is not, but he is just as near, or he ought to be just as near to you. The concept “neighbor” is actually the redoubling of your own self; “the neighbor” is what thinkers call “the other,” that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested. (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p. 21. Bold my own.)

These two thinkers, though using very different language, appear quite resonant with one another. As we saw, this “selfishness” in self-love must be tested by the existence of the “other,” the “not-I.” To transcend this selfishness, I must transcend myself. Though Florensky is discussing love apophatically (by considering the nature of Sin), he nonetheless helped me understand Kierkegaard. Continuing on he writes:

Sin is the fundamental striving of I by which I becomes firm in its isolation and makes of itself the unique point of reality. Sin is what closes off all reality from I, for to see reality is precisely to go out of oneself and to transfer one’s I into not-I, into what is other, into what is visible, i.e., it is to love. Sin is therefore the wall that I places between itself and reality, an encrustation of the heart. (PGT, p. 132)

This movement of self-transcendence is love itself for both Kierkegaard and Florensky. Kierkegaard, on the whole, is not quite so concerned with metaphysics in Works of Love, although we will touch on it later in the series. Florensky—who, by the way, wrote most of PGT at the ripe age of 26—covers metaphysics and epistemology to open the book. For Florensky, knowledge of God the Truth does not just produce love but is love itself:

In love and only in love is real knowledge of the Truth conceivable. On the other hand, knowledge of the Truth is revealed by love: he who is with Love is unable not to love. The cause cannot be distinguished from the effect here, for both are only aspects of the same mysterious fact, the fact of God’s entering into me as a philosophizing subject and my entering into God as the objective Truth.

Considered within me (according to the mode “I”), “in itself,” this “entering into” is knowledge. “For another” (according to the mode “Thou”), it is love. Finally, “for me,” as objectified and objective (i.e., according to the mode “He”), it is beauty. In other words, perceived in me by another, my knowledge of God is love of the one who perceives. Contemplated objectively, by a third, love of another is beauty. (PGT, p. 56)

Both Kierkegaard (as we will see more and more) and Florensky take the Johannine maxim with utmost seriousness: God is love. Not “love is an attribute of God,” not “love is something that God does,” but “God is love.” Florensky’s threefold distinction of truth, love, beauty is something I want to ponder more. And, of course, Florensky mentions what we will be discussing for the rest of Chapter IIA:

Love combines value with givenness and introduces duty into fleeting givenness. And duty is what gives givenness duration. Without duty, givenness rei [flows away], whereas with duty, it menei [remains]. (PGT, p. 68)

This parallels our springboard off which we will dive into the waters of Kierkegaard when we return to him:

We will now speak about: 

You shall love,

because this is the very mark of Christian love and is its distinctive characteristic—that it contains this apparent contradiction: to love is a duty. (Works of Love, p. 23-24, italics and bold original.)

All of this to say, Florensky is incredible and, if you are enjoying our Kierkegaard series, you should read him. There are topics uncountable in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth—including perhaps my favorite chapter heading of all time, “A Problem of Lewis Carroll and the Question of Dogma.” Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of the mathematician Charles Lewis Dodgson. Given Florensky’s penchant for mathematics (there are half a dozen chapters on mathematical topics) I suspect that he is talking about some mathematical formulation of Dodgson’s, not Alice in Wonderland. Florensky is an incredibly gifted thinker and writer, and he is very much worth your time. Who doesn’t have time for another massive, complicated, labyrinthine book of theology?

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• Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT): Those who are not part of the kingdom of God will be eternally damned to hell, tormented forever. This view is often associated with Christianity in popular culture, especially a version where the Devil is the “chief tormenter” of the underworld. Many of these details are not only non-biblical1 but anti-biblical2 and entirely without foundation.

• Annihilationism: Those who are not part of the kingdom of God will be annihilated, unmade.

• Universalism: Eventually, all shall be saved, hell will be empty.

Personally, I find myself most drawn towards Universalism, as I think that is most consistent with God’s character. There are many places which seem to imply a flavor of universalism in the New Testament, of which I give you two:

While in this conversation, however, I was asked to choose: if not Universalism, would I believe in Annihilationism or Eternal Conscious Torment? For many, Annihilationism seems the more humane of the two options. After all, eternity is a long time to be suffering. Nonetheless, I think Annihilationism is actually less likely to be true. There’s a few reasons for this, but I want to focus on one today, and that reason is found not in Revelation, but in Genesis. In particular, I think God’s promise to Noah implies that Annihilationism is not true.

Because of the Bible’s place in culture, it is not hard to forget that it is a collection of texts written somewhere between two and three thousand years ago. That is a long time. Think of all the things that happened within the last 1500 years:

• the fall of the Western Roman empire;

• the establishment of Christianity in Central and Western Europe

• the founding of Islam and the establishment of the Caliphate;

• the splitting of the church in 1054;

• the Crusades;

• the invention of the printing press (both in China and in Europe);

• the Industrial Revolution.

All of these events and many more besides happened hundreds, if not thousands, of years after the writing of the documents in the Bible. As a consequence, we approach these texts with different assumptions about the nature of the world. So why am I bringing all this up? Because recognizing what assumptions were shared amongst the writers of the Biblical texts will help us understand those texts. If we want to understand Genesis, we have to know something about Ancient Near Eastern cosmology.

In the Ancient Near East, there were three “realms” which composed the universe: the sky (heavens), the land, and the seas. The sea and the heavens alike are unsuitable for humans—we can neither fly nor walk on the water. The seas came to represent chaos to the Ancient Near Eastern world, and several mythologies viewed the beginning of the universe as a primordial, chaotic ocean. Thus Genesis opens:

The Bible opens not with God creating ex nihilo, but with God above the chaotic, primal ocean. So how does the land—the place for humans—come to be?

We see that God’s action of creation is an ordering of the universe. God opens a space in the chaos ocean, separating the “dome,” the heavens, from the Seas. It is this ordering of creation that allows humans to live and flourish, which we see as the rest of Genesis 1 proceeds with the creation of the plants, the fish, the birds, and finally the humans. All of creation that follows rests upon God separating the chaos above from the chaos below.

All of this is needed to understand what happens in the story of Noah and the flood. In the times leading to the flood, the earth was “filled with violence” and “all flesh had corrupted its ways” (Genesis 6:11-12). God is brought to much sorrow by this, and decides to destroy the earth. How does he go about destroying it?

God destroys the earth by releasing the “fountains of the great deep” and opening the “windows of the heavens.” These are the terms we just saw in Genesis 1, where God’s act of creation separates these very same waters. Thus, the flood story is not just a story about a meteorological event, but a proclamation that God wanted to unmake the world. The flood is the chaos waters reclaiming the earth, the unmaking of Creation. God destroys the corrupted humans in Genesis 7 by undoing his actions in Genesis 1. Yet, at the end of the flood narrative, God makes a promise to Noah:

Within the framework of the Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, this was not simply God promising not to let storms cover the world. It is a promise that God will never allow creation itself to be unmade. All that God has created—which God proclaims seven times to be good—will not cease. The earth and all within it will not be unmade in the waters of chaos. And, if Annihilationism is true, those who are not saved would be unmade, contravening God’s promise to Noah. Annihilationism would mean that the final end of the damned is release into the chaos waters, breaking God’s covenant.

This is by no means an ironclad argument. The Bible is...complicated. There is no neat summary in the Bible of what Christians “should” believe about the end fate of humanity. There are verses which seem to support each of the three views. Christians have been debating this question for two millennia, and we show no signs of stopping anytime soon.

If you want to learn more about the cultural context of the Bible, the Bible Project is a great resource to start. In particular:

• They have several shorter articles which give brief overviews on these topics. This link is the one I found that is most relevant.

• If you want a deeper dive, their series on Genesis has many hours of content that gets deep into the weeds on all the fun details. I haven’t watched the full thing by any stretch, but most of their content is well-researched and I expect this to hold true here.

What do you think of this argument? Is there something I’ve missed about Noah’s covenant with God? Which view of eternity are you most convinced by? I’m sure many of you have thoughts, and I would love to hear them in the comment section. And, for those of you wondering when the Works of Love series will resume, I am a bit swamped with other commitments right now, so I’m not sure when the next main series article will come. However, I hope to have a second Addendum coming out in the nearish future, so stay tuned for that. Thanks for reading!

Matthew 22:39: But the second commandment is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Today we continue our read-along of Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love. There's no set schedule for this, as I don't know what my semester will allow me to commit time-wise to this reading each week. If you haven't read them yet and want to catch up, here are the previous reflections:

At the suggestion of my friend , I will be using in-line citations for everything which comes from my copy of Works of Love. Anything which I cite from elsewhere will be placed in the footnotes. Any emphasis in the quotations will be assumed original unless noted otherwise.

Also: the reason for the “Part I” in the title is that we will only be covering pages 17 through the beginning of 24 today.1 This is because Kierkegaard, at the beginning of page 24, informs us that it is only the introduction to the "actual" discourse, which is on a related but different idea than what we will focus on today. There will be at least one more part for this chapter, possibly more, depending on how many themes I find. I hope that the ensuing parts will be shorter than this one, for your sake and mine. I found with this article that breaking it up into smaller pieces simply did not work pedagogically, so I present it to you in all its unwieldy glory.

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What is Presupposed?

As is seen from the title of the chapter, You Shall Love, this chapter is about the second greatest commandment: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. In particular, it is about the shall. "You shall love" is the focus of the chapter.2 But before we begin, Kierkegaard asks: what is presupposed in this commandment? What is the assumption that is made, which we first must uncover before we may proceed on?

Our quoted text also contains a presupposition that, although it comes last, is nevertheless the beginning. When it is said, "You shall love your neighbor [Næste] as yourself," this contains what is presupposed, that every person loves himself. (p. 17)

This makes sense—if we are to love our neighbors "as ourselves" then we must love ourselves to begin with. Yet Kierkegaard says that the object of Christianity is not to proclaim self-love as a right. No, he says, rather Christianity aims to rip self-love away from us:

But on the other hand is it possible for anyone to misunderstand Christianity, as if it were its intention to teach what worldly sagacity unanimously—alas, and yet contentiously—teaches, "that everyone is closest [nærmest] to himself." Is it possible for anyone to misunderstand this, as if it were Christianity's intention to proclaim self-love as a prescriptive right? Indeed, on the contrary, it is Christianity's intention to wrest self-love away from us human beings. (p. 17, final emphasis mine)

It is here that we begin to encounter part of what makes a deep reading of Kierkegaard difficult at times. On the next page, he will say that Christianity's goal is not to take away self-love so much as "...teach him proper self-love." (p. 18) And near the end of what we cover today, he says once more:

The commandment said, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," but if the commandment is properly understood it also says the opposite: You shall love yourself in the right way. (p. 22)

This means that we must carefully trace terms like "loving yourself" and "self-love" throughout this chapter (and indeed the whole book), as he will use them in different flavors to emphasize different forms of them. I know some of my diehard analytic-philosophy friends will balk at this, and I admit that it causes struggle for me as well. But I think Kierkegaard is justified in this, because things do not need to be exactly identical to be captured under the same term. Self-love can be performed in selfish, unworthy ways, or it can be done properly, in the right way. Both of these may rightly be called "self-love"—even if one ultimately is not what Kierkegaard is describing as kjerlighed. To help make this distinction, I will use selfish love to denote improper self love.

This phrase, as yourself, is remarkable. It continually tightens its grip around selfish love, not allowing it to twist its way out. If this command were to become prolix, then selfish love would win out, because selfishness can always find something that has not been considered. But as yourself—one could give "Long and discerning addresses" (p. 18) on the topic and yet never do the job that this phrase as yourself does.

Christianity presupposes that a person loves himself and then adds to this only the phrase about the neighbor as yourself. And yet there is the change of eternity between the former and the latter. (p. 18)

As we saw in last week's chapter, this "change of eternity" means the change of the divine, of the truly Christian. So selfish self-love, when it receives "love the neighbor as yourself" into itself, transforms into neighbor-love. Kierkegaard, following the biblical excerpt, presupposes that every human loves themself selfishly, that we have within ourselves this selfish self-love. It must undergo the "change of eternity".

SK then asks us: is this neighbor love truly the highest? Surely it is possible to love another person more than oneself, right? Although the age of first marriage in America is increasing,3 it is not very hard to hear someone praising romance as loving another person "more than oneself". The poets—or, in our day and age, TV writers and producers—prop up romance as "the highest", as the truest and most perfect form of love. Should we say, then, that Christianity is even-keeled? Should we praise Christianity it "because it more soberly and more firmly holds itself down to earth" (p. 19)?

Far from it. Christianity certainly knows far better than any poet what love is and what it means to love. For this very reason it also knows what perhaps escapes the poets, that the love they celebrate is secretly self-love, and that precisely by this its intoxicated expression—to love another person more than oneself—can be explained. (p. 19)

It is here that I am immensely grateful for the time and effort that Howard and Edna Hong sacrificed on our behalf. In my edition, there is a footnote at "...more than oneself—" which points to the following excerpt:

The basis for erotic love is a drive, the basis of friendship is inclination, but drive and inclination are natural qualifications, and natural qualifications are always selfish; only the eternal qualification of spirit expels the selfish; therefore there is still a hidden self-love in erotic love and friendship. [...] To relate to one single human being in unconditioned impetuous preference is to relate to oneself in self-love; [...] To be permitted to love this one person is the gratification of infatuation and of preference, but at bottom also of self-love; to despair if it is denied is the very proof that the erotic love was self-love. But precisely this escapes erotic love, it is able to come up with the giddy expression: to love another person more than oneself; alas, because the lover still has not learned to love himself in the truth and earnestness of eternity. —JP IV 4447 (Pap. VIII2 B 71:6). (p. 428-429)

There is nearly a hundred pages worth of auxiliary material in the appendix. This particular excerpt comes from the final draft of Works of Love. The excerpt was ultimately removed from the published copy. The amount of time to comb through the ~10,000 pages of papers and journals that Kierkegaard left us for the twenty seven books in the Kierkegaard's Writings series at Princeton University Press is immense.

The excerpt is important for showing us where exactly erotic love and friendship are capable of going wrong. For SK, they are natural qualifications. They are inherent to all humans, and "natural qualifications are always selfish." Without kjerlighed standing with these natural qualifications, they have within themselves the possibility of becoming pure, selfish self-love. To my mind, this tension is a central theme of the book. We will have much cause for exploring it in many of the later chapters in more detail.4

Returning to the main body, we see that Kierkegaard indeed puts friendship next to erotic love, "inasmuch as this, too, is based on preference: to love this one person above all others, to love him in contrast to all others." (p. 19, italics mine.) The phrase "inasmuch as" is the key for seeing Kierkegaard's intentions with friendship. Friendship is not, by necessity, a selfish thing. Kierkegaard assuredly read his bible more than I do,5 and would know Jesus's words about what the greatest love is.6 No, friendship need not be selfish. But as friendship is a natural love, common to all humans, so it has the possibility of being tainted by sin, common to all humans.

Therefore the object of both erotic love and of friendship has preference's name, "the beloved," "the friend," who is loved in contrast to the whole world. The Christian doctrine, on the contrary, is to love the neighbor, to love the whole human race, all people, even the enemy, and not to make exceptions, neither of preference nor of aversion. (p. 19)

As before, the excerpt below, from his assorted papers, is a few sentences deleted from the final copy of Works of Love:

Here, too, there is no occasion for despair, as in the case of the lover's not getting the beloved, because the neighbor is every person, and this is so far from being a natural qualification, an impulse of drive or of inclination to love the neighbor, that on the contrary one shall love him. —JP IV 4447 (Pap. VIII2 B 71:7) (p. 429)

Kierkegaard is bringing us to wrestle with Christianity's forceful commands to love the neighbor. Think of those who you love most, for a moment. Consider the things you would be willing to do for them; the emotions of knowing them; the power of the experience. Now take the enemy, who causes you anger or hurt or hatred. Whoever that person is—imagine loving them in the way that you love those closest to you. That is the command we must wrestle with. We are to love "the whole human race, all people, even the enemy" without exception. Who among us can do it?

If the phrase "love a man more than oneself" is nonsensical, is there anyone to whom “more than oneself” may apply? Yes—God. Kierkegaard says we are to love God unconditionally "in obedience" and "in adoration" (p. 19). But this reveals why this phrase could not apply to anyone else—loving someone in obedience and adoration is not godliness but blasphemy.

A human being, however, you shall only—but, no, this is indeed the highest—a human being you shall love as yourself. If you can perceive what is best for him better than he can, you will not be excused because the harmful thing was his own desire, was what he himself asked for. If this were not the case, it would be quite proper to speak of loving another person more than oneself, because this would mean, despite one's insight that this would be harmful to him, doing it in obedience because he demanded it, or in adoration because he desired it.

Therefore—as yourself. (p. 20)

As we have seen, this command as yourself wraps itself completely around the selfish desires we have within ourselves. No amount of questioning the Royal Law7 how it is we are to love the neighbor will free us. The Law will not answer our questions with anything more than the command—as yourself. The only route out is to ask the question that the Pharisee asked of Jesus: who is my neighbor? To whom am I bound to love? We now turn to (what appears to be) the same question:

The Other and Redoubling

Page 21, I must admit, has given me much trouble. Kierkegaard enters into deep waters, and I feel that I am not equipped philosophically to handle all of the language. We already know who the neighbor is in one sense—the neighbor is every person. This is not the question SK is really asking here, though. What he is asking is who is the neighbor, as a concept. Let's begin with the following:

Who, then, is one's neighbor [Næste]? The word is obviously derived from "nearest [Nærmeste]"; thus the neighbor is the person who is nearer to you than anyone else, yet not in the sense of preferential love, since to love someone who in the sense of preferential love is nearer than anyone else is self-love—"do not the pagans also do the same?" The neighbor, then, is nearer to you than anyone else. But is he also nearer to you than you are to yourself? No, that he is not, but he is just as near, or he ought to be just as near to you. The concept "neighbor" is actually the redoubling of your own self; "the neighbor" is what thinkers call "the other," that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested. (p. 21, italics original, bold mine)

We must begin by considering what we mean when we say something like "self". For the term "my self" to mean anything, there must be something that is "my self" and something that is "not my self". This is because we are social beings in the world. By the very nature of my existence as David, there is something in the world that is not-David. This something is the opposite of my self; it is my other. You, my reader, are an "other" to me, and I to you. For me, you are my other. But I am your other as well, so my other's other is...me.

My self-existence, since it requires the existence of an "other," is therefore dependent on the "other" existing. My existence, understood fully, depends on the existence of the "other," of that which is not-David. This "other" is the category that Kierkegaard refers to. Why does he say that this category of the other is "that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested"? Because: if I am to authentically recognize the nature of my own existence, it means I must recognize that my existence depends on my being an other to another.8 So, to authentically be my "self," I must recognize that I am both self, to myself, and other, to my "other". This is what Kierkegaard calls "redoubling," because through this motion of recognizing the existence of the "other," I recognize that I am not just "self." The true "self" is both self and other. Kierkegaard also identifies the concept of "other" with the Bible's category of "the neighbor."

I know, it's a lot. I'm still struggling with this notion, myself. It's difficult to take in. But I think we see some elements of this in Jesus's own words:

Matthew 16:24–25: Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. [25] For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (ESV)

Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. I must give up my life, my "self," and recognize that I am "other" to another, and this motion of redoubling is the motion of true life. Why? Because this motion is the motion of Christian love:

As far as thought is concerned, the neighbor does not even need to exist. If someone living on a desert island mentally conformed to this commandment, by renouncing self-love he could be said to love the neighbor. To be sure, "neighbor" in itself is a multiplicity, since "the neighbor" means "all people," and yet in another sense one person is enough in order for you to be able to practice the Law. In the selfish sense, in being a self it is impossible consciously to be two; self-love must be by itself. Nor does it take three, because if there are two, that is, if there is one other person whom you in the Christian sense love as yourself or in whom you love the neighbor, then you love all people. (p. 21, bold mine, italics original).

The selfish self-love that Kierkegaard decries is the love of those who refuse to step outside themselves. He tells us that Christian love requires not seeing ourselves as just self but as both self and other. When I love selfishly, what I am doing is refusing to recognize the following.

Though I am "self" to myself, I am not "self" to everyone, but only myself. To others, indeed to everyone else, I am "other," and I cannot love them properly if I do not recognize this. I think this is why Kierkegaard says "In the selfish sense, in being a self it is impossible consciously to be two; self-love must be by itself." When I love myself selfishly, it is because I am centered on myself alone, as self. True love requires the renunciation of my life, willing to see myself not through myself but through the eyes of the "other".

This is also why friendship and erotic love, insofar as they are based on preference, have the capacity for selfish self-love and are therefore not "Christian" to Kierkegaard. When we selfishly self-love, we are centering our own preferences. Most of us have probably lost friendships because our friend ceases to make time for us. Why? Because they are obsessed with their current romantic partner.9 (Some of us may have even been that friend.) I think SK would say that in that situation, your former friend is failing to see himself through the "other", because his romantic partner is merely an extension of his preferences, of his self. The lovebirds are tied together through preference, and preference is simply an extension of my selfhood and my desires. Pure, unadulterated preference lacks awareness of the other.

But what self-love unconditionally cannot endure is redoubling, and the commandment's as yourself is a redoubling. The person aflame with erotic love, by reason or by virtue of this ardor, can by no means bear redoubling, which here would mean to give up the erotic love if the beloved required it. The lover therefore does not love the beloved as himself, because he is imposing requirements, but this as yourself expressly contains a requirement on him—alas, and yet the lover thinks that he loves the other person even more than himself. (p. 21, bold mine, italics original.)

Let's try to follow this logic very carefully. (Selfish) self-love, as SK seems to believe, is defined by its failure to see itself as both "self" and "other"—its failure to redouble itself. The reason erotic love, when it falls into the flames of selfish love, cannot bear redoubling, is because seeing the beloved as an other would require "giv[ing] up the erotic love if the beloved required it." Why is this? Because, in seeing myself as both self and other, I make room for the preferences of the other. The other is not just some abstract entity in this situation. No, it becomes part of me, because as we said, the self is both self and other. This is the content of the great commandment as yourself. It is not merely a nicety, a lovely turn of phrase. No, it indicates the true nature of love—the inclusion of the other within myself.

This is the hardest section we've covered in this series so far, and the rest of the article will be easier from here. I'm going to see if I can sum this up nicely in a few bullet points. This is as much for my own benefit as it is yours, dear reader, as I imagine we are both struggling with this section.

• The self, in its true nature, is not just "self" but "self" and "other". This is because, though I am truly "self" to myself, I am also truly an "other" to another person. This category of "other" is what SK calls "the neighbor."

• Selfish self-love is the manifestation of my failure to recognize that true self is self and other. Selfish love is the extension of myself without the other, through my own preferences. When I love the friend, the beloved, in opposition to the rest of the world (the "other"), I am loving in a selfish way. True love is not exclusionary; it does not love in opposition to the other. No, true love redoubles itself by recognizing that I must incorporate the other into myself. My preferences must cease to be all-controlling. They must give way to the preferences of the other person, even if those preferences should require giving up the erotic love, the friendship.10

• Because true love involves a "redoubling," the motion of incorporating what is "not-self" into myself, it requires stepping outside myself. It is this motion that gives rise to the famous Simone Weil quote: "To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger."11 This stepping outside myself, simultaneously finding myself in the other and bringing the neighbor into myself, is the key for true love. It is in the other that I again find myself; just as the other is in me, I am in them.12

I think the beginning of the next paragraph also sums it up in a helpful way:

In this way the neighbor comes as close to self-love as possible. If there are only two people, the other person is the neighbor; if there are millions, everyone of these is the neighbor, who in turn is closer than the friend and the beloved, inasmuch as they, as the objects of preference, more or less hold together with the self-love in one. (p. 21, italics original, bold mine.)

The friend and the beloved, inasmuch as we relate to them as objects of preference (how horrible a thing, to objectify someone), are objects not of true love but of selfish self-love. Even the phrase "objects of preference" betrays that this form of love does not recognize the beloved, the friend, as a true other. No, they are reduced to mere objects of preference. As we will see in the next article, this means that selfish self-love is grounded in things which are ultimately contingent, and that is a very big problem indeed.

I'm sure there is much more that could be said about "the other" and redoubling, but I have reached the end of what understanding I have of this passage.13 I would love to hear your thoughts, both on what Kierkegaard is saying and my success (or otherwise) of explicating it.14 I will note how what we have seen here appears in what follows, when relevant. With that, we move swiftly on to (somewhat) shallower waters.

The one to whom I have a duty is my neighbor, and when I fulfill my duty I show that I am a neighbor. Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbor but about becoming a neighbor oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbor just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy. By this he did not show that the assaulted man was his neighbor but that he was a neighbor of the one assaulted. [...] To choose a beloved, to find a friend, yes, this is a complicated business, but one's neighbor is easy to recognize, easy to find if only one will personally—acknowledge one's duty. (p. 22, bold my own.)

The bolded phrase is very reminiscent of our reflections from chapter 1—that the true way to know love is nothing other than to lovingly believe in love itself. These are parallel questions and answers:

• How is it that I am to know love? By becoming one who loves and lovingly seeing love in others.

• How is it that I am to know who is my neighbor? By recognizing my duty to others and becoming a neighbor to others.

This should make sense, given how closely SK ties his notion of "love" together with "the other," which is equal to "the neighbor." Who is my other? Everyone, the neighbor is everyone. I can only come to recognize this by seeing the other in myself, by stepping outside myself and redoubling myself. The focus for us, unlike the Pharisee of Luke 10, should be not on knowing who my neighbor is but on my being a neighbor. The focus for us, unlike the hypocrites, should be not on knowing who is loving but on our being people who love.

Having shown that selfish self-love cannot abide this as yourself, that Christian love requires becoming the neighbor, SK now returns to the idea of self-love:

The commandment said, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," but if the commandment is properly understood it also says the opposite: You shall love yourself in the right way. Therefore, if anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either. [...] To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbor correspond perfectly to one another; fundamentally they are one and the same thing. When the Law's as yourself as wrested from you the self-love that Christianity sadly enough must presuppose to be in every human being, then you have actually learned to love yourself. The Law is therefore: You shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself. (p. 22-23, italics original, bold my own.)

This is where SK makes the divide between selfish self-love and right self-love most apparent. Selfish self-love, as we have seen, rejects the existence of the neighbor. It refuses to admit that by my very existence I posit the existence of another, which must be incorporated into myself. Selfish love, as Kierkegaard noted to begin this chapter, is in all of us. That is what is presupposed. Christianity presupposes that this selfishness is innate to all humans. Selfish love manifests itself in me by loving my own preferences, often by loving some people in contradistinction to other people. The highest form of this in my own culture is seen in romance—two people "fall in love" so deeply that their world falls into solipsism. All that exists, for this couple, is the "other" person—yet not the other in our sense, because their love is loving the "other" as opposed to all other people. In this way, this solipsism is not true love, because it is a mere extension of the "self" without the neighbor. The two collapse to one.

Right self-love can only occur after I have stepped outside of myself, seen myself not as self but as neighbor, and loved myself just as I love the neighbor. I extend myself, recognizing that the other person is also within me, and I in them. I must not consider myself from the inside, as it were. I must come out of my house and appraise it from the outside, before returning inward to love myself.

Kierkegaard is loath to give the reader too few examples of people failing to love themselves, so he then gives many of them; we skip past the first few and begin again here:

When the depressed person desires to be rid of life, indeed, of himself, is this not because he is unwilling to learn earnestly and rigorously to love himself? When someone surrenders to despair because the world or another person has faithlessly left him betrayed, what then is his fault (his innocent suffering is not referred to here) except not loving himself in the right way? When someone self-tormentingly thinks to do God a service by torturing himself, what is his sin except not willing to love himself in the right way? And if, alas, a person presumptuously lays violent hands upon himself, is not his sin precisely this, that he does not rightly love himself in the sense in which a person ought to love himself? (p. 23)

Philosophers are often depressed [citation needed] and Kierkegaard was not an exception.15 I would go so far as to say that he knows better than most what it is like to be filled with crippling depression or anxiety—his journals make that crystal clear. I know from my own experience that being told "you just aren't loving yourself rightly" in the middle of a depressive episode would be...less than helpful. And yet, slowly internalizing this understanding of proper self-love has actually helped me deal with my depression better.

If the self is truly self and other, if others are in me and I in them, then every attempt at self-harm (physical or mental) is an attempt at harming another. When I want to release the suffering in unhealthy ways, remembering that doing so is an act of harm against the neighbor forces me to reckon with what I am truly doing. When I harm myself, I do not just harm myself. Insofar as I am in every person—for the neighbor is the other, and I am in the neighbor, the neighbor is in me—I harm every person. This does not mean I blame myself for depression, anxiety, and other such things which are out of my control. But it does mean that when I am forced to respond to these uncontrollable events, I must remember that I am not just myself. No, all those I love are in me, and I in them. For SK, that is not a nicety, a sparkling turn of phrase: it is the honest-to-god truth.

Where else do we see this more starkly than on the cross? God crosses the gap between human and divine and joins us in our suffering. His suffering is now our suffering, and our suffering his:

1 Peter 4:13: But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

Philippians 3:10–11: [...] that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, [11] that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Colossians 1:24: Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, (ESV, bold my own)

[Aside: This last one is striking. Here we see the movement of Paul stepping outside himself and taking on the sufferings of "the other," just as Jesus steps outside himself and takes on our sufferings…but there's something much deeper going on here. It is not simply that the church shares in Christ's afflictions as his body—Paul goes beyond that. He says that he himself is filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions. Huh?? How is that even possible? I've only just begun researching this topic myself, which was introduced to me by the work of . Which is to say, I am capable of doing no more than blindly gesturing at that verse with little more than amazement and wonder as I begin to see the outlines of its implications. I highly recommend you check out his work on Maximus the Confessor and Neo-Chalcedonian Christology if this is at all of interest to you.]

All that to say—if God himself is in me, then I must learn "earnestly and rigorously" to love myself rightly. All of us must. This failure to love ourselves rightly, which Kierkegaard calls treachery, is more dangerous than any other treachery. The failure to love ourselves rightly is indeed the same as the failure to love the neighbor. Others may betray us; others may fail us; but no other person can ever stop me from loving rightly. Only I can betray myself in that way.

We may now begin...the real topic?

The commandment about love for the neighbor therefore speaks in one and the same phrase, as yourself, about this love and about love of oneself. And now the introduction to the discourse ends with what it wishes to make the object of consideration: that is, the commandment about love for the neighbor and about love of oneself becomes synonymous not only through this phrase "as yourself" but even more through the phrase you shall. We will now speak about:

You shall love,

because this is the very mark of Christian love and is its distinctive characteristic—that it contains this apparent contradiction: to love is a duty. (p. 23-24, italics and bold original.)

As you can see, we are in for a ride. To love is a duty will indeed shatter many of our understandings, breaking apart what we think love is on the rocks of reality. Yet we must stop here, dear reader, for my brain is near the bursting point, and I imagine yours is, too.

I find Kierkegaard to be a scintillating, generative thinker who forces me to wrestle with my conceptions of life itself. It would be wonderful if you would join me in that wrestling down below in the comments—I will strive to be particularly active for all of this series in any comment threads which appear. Thanks for reading.

As the title indicates, much of what follows falls under general housekeeping and cleanliness. To that point, I have decided to shift all of my mathematical writing to another substack, The Mathematician’s Suitcase.

The Mathematician's Suitcase

Learning about mathematics, one page from the suitcase at a time.

I will let you peruse the new page on your own time to learn the story behind that name. As part of that, all of my previous articles here have been moved over there, and I will be posting all future mathematical content at The Mathematician’s Suitcase. This is for two reasons:

• I want to give people an easy way to see just my math writing—not least of which are people who may be reading my resume for PhD applications in the near future. This will also mean that Words Without Knowledge will be exclusively devoted to…everything I write about that isn’t math.

• Substack still sucks for mathematical writing. LaTeX mode still doesn’t render the “+” symbol properly on the mobile app, which is an egregious oversight that I complained about over a year ago. The struggles with the callout boxes plus the lack of in-line LaTeX support makes mathematical exposition on substack too painful for me to devote much time to. I will still do some occasional mathematical writing, but not much until Substack decides it’s worth investing a few hours of coding into fixing these issues.

As such, if you want to find any future mathematical content of mine, I suggest you subscribe over there.

The other update is that I am turning on paid subscriptions for this substack. This is not because I currently plan to paywall articles. Rather, it is because I am, Lord willing, soon to be a PhD student and all that that entails. PhD program applications cost me money, which is silly but true. The two options you now have as a subscriber to Words Without Knowledge are:

• free, and;

• free, but you give me money because you are a Very Nice Person™️.

If you decide to send me money you will officially be on the Very Nice Person™️ list, which is a benefit far more expansive and important than anything I could write for you behind a paywall.

In all seriousness, thank you to you all for subscribing already. The next installment of the Works of Love series will be out later this week, and I hope to have some (mercifully) shorter articles cooking up soon.

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